


Andante con moto

by gedsparrowhawk (FaceChanger)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, Humor, M/M, Mutual Pining, Mystery, Romance, Slow Burn, soft gay piano playing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-17
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-02-01 05:35:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 54,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12698415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaceChanger/pseuds/gedsparrowhawk
Summary: The footsteps stopped in front of Draco's cell. He looked up.An Auror stood in front of him, his dark hair wild, his brown face unreadable, and his green eyes achingly, and annoyingly, familiar.“Come to gloat, Potter?” Draco asked, summoning as much of his habitual drawl as he could muster, while curled up and shivering on the floor.In which Draco Malfoy is framed for murder, and only Harry Potter believes he's innocent.





	1. Anacrusis

**Author's Note:**

> **THIS FIC IS COMPLETED THROUGH CHAPTER 7 AND WILL BE UPDATED WEEKLY.**  
>     
> A million thank you's to Shivani, who encouraged me and yelled at me by turns, who read all of this before anyone else, and who put up with my abuse of the comma.

 

 

_“Nothing is more intolerable than to have admit to yourself your own errors.” _

_ ― Ludwig van Beethoven _

 

 

The early autumn sun fell in through the manor windows and across the desk. An untidy stack of papers teetered on the edge of overbalancing, beside a mostly empty inkwell and several broken quills. Draco sat at the desk in the study, checking over the finances for the estate. Ink stained his hands.

He heard the door creak open, and Franny edged into the room, closing the door again behind her. He glanced up at her. She wasn’t carrying a tray of tea, which was odd; she didn’t usually interrupt him during the day like this unless it was the bring him food or tea. The house-elf stood, wringing her hands together nervously. “Master Draco, there are people at the gate,” she hissed.

Draco shrugged and looked back at the sums. He couldn’t get the totals for some of the rents in town to add up quite right, which meant that either he had made a mistake somewhere or one of the tenants had underpaid. He was hoping it was the former. He’d already had a row with one of the tenants the week before about the rent, and he didn’t want relations deteriorating further. “Who is it?”

“Aurors, sir! And very serious.”

Draco looked up irritably. “What do they want? Is it about my wand?”

“Franny doesn’t know, sir. Franny thought it best to ask Master Draco.” The house-elf scowled a bit. She was more than a little territorial over the manor these days, and didn’t like unexpected guests. Come to think of it, she didn’t like expected guests all that much either.

“Yes, all right. I’ll go see what they want,” Draco said. He set down his quill beside the inkwell and pulled on a jumper. A fire burned cheerily in the corner of the study, but it was too much effort to keep the entire manor warm, and the weather had turned sharply cold in the past week or so. “Bring tea to the small library and light a fire,” he said, after a moment’s thought. There was a fine line he walked these days: welcoming but not overly so, polite but not simpering, and never risking the appearance of showing off. Humility was a lesson learned late but learned well.

Franny held the door open for him, and he paused and smiled down at her. He really was quite fond of her. She nodded back, before disappearing down the corridor.

Draco sighed and adjusted his collar under the jumper. He ran a hand over his hair. He was sure it was a sight—he had run his hands through it absently as he did the sums, and in the past couple months he had let it grow a bit unkempt—but he didn’t have the time now to hunt for a comb. Settling for pushing it back and out of his face, he navigated his way through the winding corridors and to the front hallway.

The Aurors would be waiting at the gate, which had gotten stubborn these days about letting unfamiliar people into the grounds. Traumatized by the occupation, Draco reckoned. But then, who wasn’t? The portraits had been skittish for months after he reclaimed the manor, hiding in unused rooms. He’d had to bring in an expert to restore several smashed frames, which he hadn’t really had the money for, but it had seemed so disgraceful to leave the portraits in disarray. He’d left the gate as it was, though. Draco liked the control it gave him over who was allowed in and who wasn’t, although he knew it bothered the Aurors who popped by every so often to let him know they hadn’t forgotten about what his family name meant.

Outside was not all that much colder than inside. A stiff breeze rattled the overgrown shrubbery. He ought to get someone in to prune them back, he noted mentally. Or perhaps he might look up some gardening spells himself. He wasn’t completely inept at herbology, and he might be able to save a hundred or so galleons doing it on his own. The white gravel of the drive crunched under his shoes. Two Aurors stood at the gate, looking as serious as Franny had made them out to be.

“Draco Lucius Malfoy?” one of the Aurors asked.

Draco raised his eyebrows at the use of his full name. “I apologize for the gate. It’s a bit temperamental.” He touched the gate, and it swung reluctantly open, its hinges squeaking the entire way. He shot it a wry glance. “Is this about my wand?” he asked.

“I’m afraid not, Mr Malfoy,” the other Auror said. Draco’s eyes flickered uncertainly between her and the first Auror.

“I’ve had my house-elf prepare tea, if you’d like to come inside,” he said.

The first Auror shook his head. Draco recognized him from some ball or other as a man named Owsley. Halfblood, if Draco recalled correctly, although he hated himself a little bit for remembering that before anything else. Owsley was fingering his wand far less subtly than he thought. Out of the corner of his eye, Draco caught the other Auror smile briefly.

Owsley said, “Draco Malfoy, you’re under arrest.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Draco snapped, drawing the Malfoy haughtiness up around himself to disguise the sudden way the bottom of his stomach dropped away and yawning pit of dismay opened before him. “I was acquitted. Potter himself vouched for me.”

“Not to do with the war,” Owsley said. “A muggle down in the village was found dead two nights ago. It was the killing curse, and your wand was found at the scene.”

Draco hadn’t taken his hand away from the gate, and he clenched one of the metal bars reflexively, and so tightly that his knuckles went white. The coldness of the iron was the only thing keeping him grounded. “I reported my wand stolen a week ago,” he said. His voice sounded amazingly steady. He had learned, at Hogwarts and then again after, to keep everything he felt off his face and out of his voice, but Pansy once told him it left him looking and sounding cold and dead. He couldn’t sound like that now. He couldn’t sound like his father, casually denying something of which he was clearly guilty. He wasn’t sure how else to sound.

Owsley narrowed his eyes at Draco. “Yeah, awfully convenient, that. You can tell us all about it back at the Ministry. We’ve a warrant for your arrest, and I would much rather you come quietly.”

“I wouldn’t,” muttered the second Auror.

Draco stood a moment longer, the early autumn breeze chapping his pale cheeks red, the iron gate clutched in his hand, weighing his options. He could, he supposed, close the gate on them. The wards on the manor were strong, and they would not be able to get in, at least not without considerable effort. But he had no wand, and the manor would not last that long under siege with just him and a house elf. And, anyway, that would only make him look guilty.

“All right,” he said. “I— Yes, all right, but let me tell my house elf.”

Owsley pursed his lips, but nodded.

Not taking his eyes from the Aurors, Draco called out, “Franny!” There was a pop, and the elf was standing there. Draco didn’t wait for her to speak. “Franny, I’m being arrested. They think I’ve killed a muggle down in the village. I haven’t, obviously, but I must go with them. I need you to go get Mother and tell her what’s happened. Understood?”

Franny trembled, gazing at the Aurors hatefully with her huge brown eyes. “Master Draco didn’t kill anyone!”

The second Auror frowned at her. Draco said sharply, “Franny, I need you to go to Mother, now!”

Franny looked at Draco and nodded. “Franny will get Mistress Narcissa.” She disappeared again with a loud crack. In any other circumstances, Draco would have smiled at it. Franny only ever made that much noise when Apparating when she was being spiteful. As it was, he turned back to Aurors. “Well, I haven’t my wand. You needn’t disarm me.”

He let go of the gate, finally, and to his surprise, he was able to walk steadily forward. The second Auror, the one who didn’t like him, grabbed his arms and pulled them behind his back, binding them with a charm. “Is this all really necessary?” he asked.

“Shut up,” the Auror hissed in his ear. She grabbed his arm in preparation for a side along Apparation, holding on much harder than was strictly necessary. Draco twisted his head around to look back at the manor again.

The manor stared back at him, imposing and dark as ever. It didn’t look particularly stately, anymore, nor particularly homelike, but like an abandoned wreck, slowly falling to ruin.

For all that it felt like he had walked out onto a precipice over some terrible abyss, and the precipice was rapidly crumbling underneath him, he felt remarkably calm. He’d never thought it entirely right that he be acquitted for his actions before and during the war, whatever that self-righteous git Potter might have said about how Draco was a minor and had been in an impossible position. Draco hadn’t been a child and had known what choices he had been making, and, as much as he regretted it later on, he had walked into the whole thing with his eyes open. Putting aside notions of legal justice and specific guilt, being arrested now for the death of a muggle he had had nothing to do with felt an awful lot like his past finally catching up with him.

The Auror Disapparated, and the manor disappeared as Draco went with her, pulled into the black, oppressive dark.

 

* * *

 

Harry had been away for the past several weeks, working with the Latvian magical government to smoke out the last of a dark artefacts smuggling ring that had been trafficking illegal objects into Britain. If he hadn’t been away, he would have heard about the whole thing before it happened from office gossip, rather than from a week out of date Daily Prophet that a bedraggled screech owl delivered to the safe house before nipping at his fingers and falling asleep beside the fireplace.

Ron had attached a note, most of which was news about plans for Hermione and his wedding. But at the end, in a couple of brief lines written with different ink he had added:

_“Don’t know how much British news you’re getting out there. Thought you ought to see this, mate. Guess they got the smug bastard in the end, though I didn’t think he had it in him to actually kill someone. You were right about him all along.”_

The story dominated the first page, written up, naturally, by Rita Skeeter, so as he read it, Harry discarded all of the details and focused on the basic facts. On the 27th of September, 2002, Draco Malfoy was arrested at Malfoy Manor for the murder of a local muggle named Albert Shrew, whom he had had an argument with the previous week. Malfoy’s wand had been found at the scene and had performed the killing curse. He was being held at Azkaban until his trial. An accompanying mugshot stared accusingly into the camera and kept brushing a strand of overly long hair out of his eyes.

If Skeeter was to be believed, Narcissa Malfoy, who had been away for the majority of the past three years, was now back in England and pulling every political string she had left in order to try and get the charges against her son dropped.

Harry had put the paper down, feeling rather ill, and hadn’t mentioned it to Ron in his reply.

By the time he wrapped up the Latvia case and made it home to England, he found the whole thing more difficult to ignore.

When he got into the office on Thursday morning, just back from Latvia the night before, there were the usual congratulations on a case well done, which he accepted with a shrug and a smile. He settled into his desk, and eyed the paperwork that accompanied the closing of an international case with distaste. Latvia had ended badly. They had arrested most of the traffickers, but some of the Latvian wizards had been hurt, and there would be inquiries into that now that he was back.

He used to like the moments like at the end, in Latvia, when they had burst in, wands blazing, and taken down the ring. These days, though, those moments of the thoughtless adrenaline rush were overshadowed by everything that accompanied them. He hated what came after: Apparating the wounded to hospitals and hoping that it wasn’t too late. He had hated the waiting before that, tailing people and skulking around corners. He hated the impersonality of it all, the moment he was expected to walk away once it was closed, or deemed cold.

And, most of all at this particular moment, he hated the blasted paperwork at the end of it all, when he had to justify every decision he had made along the way, in triplicate.

Electing to let the paperwork ripen on his desk for a while, he stood up and wandered off in search of a cup of coffee.

On his way back, a good fifteen minutes later, coffee in hand, and nursing a building headache, he nearly collided with the Auror who sat at the desk between him and Ron, an absentminded muggleborn named Monica Welling. She was a year or two younger than him but rising fast.

“Sorry, Welling,” he said, grabbing his coffee out of the way.

“Don’t worry about it, Potter.” She grinned at him. “Nice job with the Latvia thing.”

“Thanks,” Harry said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “You don’t happen to have any potions for a headache?”

“No potions, but I’ve got some ibuprofen.”

“That works.”

She ducked back to her desk for a moment and rummaged in the drawers for a minute or two. She returned with a couple of pills. “Never understood why most wizards are so scared of muggle medicine.”

Harry shrugged and swallowed the pills with a gulp of too-hot coffee. “Don’t you hate potions?”

Welling shuddered. “That’s different. Potions have, like, all sorts of bits in them.”

He chuckled. “What have you been working on lately?”

She waved her hand vaguely. “This and that. Some barmy bastard out in Dorset was trying to sell defective charms. I closed that one by myself. It was just a fine, but people had been getting all sorts of curses put on them. I think they should have at least given him some sort of community service. And I helped MacMillan catch some bloke in the city who was mistreating house elves. I think that was Granger’s pet statute, wasn’t it? Oh!” Welling’s eyes lit up. “I’m so stupid, I forgot you were away for this! I’ve told everyone else. They sent me out with Owsley to arrest Draco Malfoy.”

Harry, mid sip of coffee, sputtered for a moment, startled. He coughed, recovering himself. “Yeah, yeah Ron sent me the write up in the Prophet. I skimmed though, I hadn’t realized you were part of that.”

Welling nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, they didn’t mention our names in the paper. We went up to his manor, one of the old places, you know, like all the pureblood families have, and arrested him right there. Owsley let me sit in on the interrogation. I didn’t say all that much obviously, it’s all a bit above my pay grade at the moment, but it’s a really good sign! I think they might start giving me more serious cases soon.”

“You think he did it then?”

“Who, Malfoy?” She snorted. “Potter, he’s Lucius Malfoy’s son. We all know where You-Know-Who was staying during the war. We all know who his father is. It’s not surprising, really. Anyway, we found his wand at the scene. He’d hidden it behind one of the baseboards, which might have fooled the muggle police, but we caught it pretty quickly.”

Harry sipped his coffee and hummed noncommittally.

“Well, anyway. I’ve not had any new big cases since then, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.”

“It seems careless though, doesn’t it? To leave his wand behind like that? I mean, Malfoy’s never been entirely meticulous, but he’s never been that careless.” Harry thought of Malfoy in sixth year, and the various convoluted but persistent plots on Dumbledore’s life. He thought of Malfoy doggedly working on the vanishing cabinet, hidden away in the Room of Requirement.

Welling eyed Harry. “I don’t really see why it matters. There’s no one else it could have been.” She paused for a moment, thinking. “Oh! Oh, he said! You vouched for him, didn’t you? After the war?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah, I did. I thought he deserved a second chance.”

“Well,” Welling said, shrugging, “It’s not your fault if he was given a second chance and blew it.”

Harry was silent for a long moment. “No, I suppose not.” He sighed, shook his head a bit, and smiled at Welling. “You should get back to work, Welling. Cases don’t solve themselves.”

Welling grinned at him. “Let me know if you need any more painkillers.”

Harry waved her off and returned to his desk. Sighing, he searched through his drawers until he found the folder with the forms for international work. He tried to focus his mind on the scratching of the quill and on recounting the details of the investigation and subsequent arrests, but his mind kept refocusing on the image of Malfoy, haughty as ever, flicking a lock of hair from his face in his mugshot.

Twice, Harry filled in something wrong on the paperwork, and had to start entirely over, and the day dragged on impossibly long and dull.

 

* * *

 

Ron had been out that day, called up to Scotland about some dark artefact that had resurfaced in the home of an ex-Death Eater, but at half five he wandered back into the office and over to Harry’s desk.

He sat down on the edge of the desk, and then nudged Harry’s chair with his foot when he didn’t look up. “Mate, is your paperwork really that interesting?”

Harry startled. His glasses went askew, and he sat blinking and running his hand through his hair. “Think I fell asleep,” he said blearily.

Ron laughed and looked down at the paperwork in front of Harry. “’We entered the building at approximately 4:30 in the morning. The Latvian wizards went first, wands drawn, and fired several stunning spells. The head of mission was hit by a cutting curse from one of the traffickers.’” Ron looked up. “Bloody riveting. How do you make something so exciting sound so unbelievably dull?”

Harry groaned. “Do you know, Ron? Do you know how many times I have been written up for reckless endangerment during combat? There’s bound to be inquiries on this, even though it was the goddamn Latvians! About the only thing I can do at this point is make the whole thing sound bloody fucking boring and hope to Merlin that no one catches on that what actually happened was, we heard a scream, so we ran in and hoped for the best.”

Ron stood up, stretching. “Coming to dinner at me and Hermione’s? We’ve still got some of that firewhiskey George gave her for her birthday.”

“That sounds brilliant.” Harry pushed away from his desk, and they made their way into the lift and up to the atrium, chatting about nothing. “Floo or Apparate?”

“Hermione’s been on about the dangers of smoke inhalation in the Floo system, so better Apparate,” Ron said. Somehow, it sounded less like a complaint and more like fondness.

Harry grinned despite himself. “Has she found a new crusade yet?”

“Just trying on a bunch for now. Smoke inhalation this week, the plight of pixies the next. You know how it goes.”

“Yeah. How’s the wedding planning going?”

Ron grimaced. “Mum and Hermione’s mum are doing most of it. Hermione holes up with them for a while, comes out, announces I’ll be wearing lilac, I say I will bloody not, she huffs and goes back in.”

Harry laughed, picturing Ron’s fourth year dress robes, but in light purple. “Really? Lilac?”

“That’s what I said! Ginny teased me for a week, said it would bring out the undertones in my skin, whatever that means.” Ron sighed and shook his head, looking put upon. “I missed you, mate. Glad you're back.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “Latvia was…” He hesitated, remembering the way one of the Latvian wizards, a man with whom he had become, if not friends then at least drinking buddies, had bled out on the floor after a particularly nasty curse had caught him across the stomach. “I think I’ll stay in Britain for a while,” he amended.

Ron thumped him on the back. “George’s firewhiskey,” he repeated. The lift opened up into the atrium.

“Separate or side-along?” Harry asked.

Ron glanced at him like he was crazy. “Separate, are you kidding? Do you know how much higher the chances of Splinching are with side-along?”

“Hermione?” Harry guessed.

“Hermione,” Ron agreed. “See you there.”

“Right,” said Harry, and Disapparated with a faint pop. There was the dizzying, nauseating moment in the dark, which no matter how many times Harry Apparated he could never quite get used to, but before he had much time to think about it, he popped back into existence next to the dumpster behind Ron and Hermione’s building. He wrinkled his nose at the smell. A moment later Ron appeared as well.

“One of these days,” Harry commented, “there will be some poor muggle emptying the bin, and we’ll scare the shit out of them and have to pay a secrecy fine.”

Ron waved him off, unconcerned. “Come on.”

Hermione and Ron lived on the seventh floor of a muggle building, in a heavily warded flat. Ron was absolutely delighted by it, and so was his father, as it had all of the muggle modern conveniences, including central heating and a washer and dryer. Hermione’s parents had even bought them a television when they moved in, and while you couldn’t perform any magic in the flat while it was on, Ron was slowly working his way through Hermione’s favorite movies.

When they stepped inside, Hermione poked her head out from the kitchen. “Harry! How was Latvia?”

“No work talk!” Ron said. “If you’re going to ask about work, you can go find him at work.”

Hermione smiled sheepishly. “Sorry, Harry.”

Harry waved her off. “Latvia was fine. I’m glad I’m back.”

Dinner at Ron and Hermione’s was always good these days. Neither of them had started off as particularly good cooks, but Molly Weasley had undertaken to teach them both several basic cooking charms, the result of which was simple but very good food. After weeks of bland take away in Latvia, just having a change was hugely refreshing.

After they finished, as the dishes washed themselves and put themselves neatly away, they passed round the firewhiskey in the living room. “You saw the Prophet I sent you?” Ron asked, unexpectedly.

Harry nodded slowly. “The thing about Malfoy?”

“Yeah. You never mentioned it, I wasn’t sure if you’d seen it. That screech owl seemed reliable, but you never know with rentals.”

“No, I saw it. Welling told me today she helped take him in.”

“She’s been bragging about that to anyone who’ll listen,” Ron said, rolling his eyes. “Thinks it’ll land her a promotion. I told her that if arresting former Death Eaters was all it took to get a promotion, you and I would be co-Head Aurors.”

Hermione sipped at her firewhiskey thoughtfully. “It seems odd though, doesn’t it? I mean, I ran into him at a few charity events, and he’s always been perfectly civil. Did you know, he actually told me not long ago that he supported large aspects of my house elf treatment bill?”

Ron snorted, “Hermione, do you remember how his father treated Dobby?”

“Well, that’s rather the point isn’t it? It was unexpected."

Ron looked at Harry, grinning conspiratorially. “If someone treats their house elves well, then they must be all right, whether or not they’re accused of murder.”

“As it happens, Ronald,” Hermione said hotly, “I do think that the way one treats their house elves is a fairly good indicator of character.”

“Relax, Hermione,” Ron said, reaching over and taking her hand. “I’m just teasing.”

Hermione, looking somewhat mollified, squeezed his hand back. “I know that, I just didn’t really think he had it in him to murder someone.”

“Me neither,” said Harry.

“Come off it, mate,” Ron laughed. “You spent all of sixth year convinced he was trying to murder Dumbledore, and you were right.”

Harry shrugged. “He couldn’t do it in the end, though.” He sighed and shifted in his seat. “Merlin, I don’t want to talk about Malfoy. We’re not fifteen anymore, and it’s not our case.”

“Harry’s right,” Hermione said. “Ron, did I tell you I spoke to Molly again? And Fleur stopped by, and she had some ideas about the bouquets for the tables.”

Harry, finishing his firewhiskey stood up. “All right, if this is turning to wedding talk, I’m leaving.”

“Hermione, you’re driving him off,” Ron teased.

“No, it’s almost half ten, and I should get home.”

Ron grimaced. “When did we get to be such old people?”

“Yeah, remember the good old days, sleeping in a tent, running for our lives?” Harry grinned.

“I meant more like staying up all hours in the common room, but sure, that too.”

“Molly’s having Sunday roast at the Burrow this weekend,” Hermione put in. “Everyone’ll be there.” 

“Sure, see you then,” Harry said. He took a pinch of Floo powder off the mantle, and ducked into the grate.

“Oh, Harry, there’s so little research on smoke inhalation with the Floo system,” Hermione said anxiously.

“Twelve Grimmauld Place,” Harry said clearly, grinned at Hermione, and then whooshed off through the chimneys in a flash of green flame.

 

* * *

 

It took a full excruciating week to wrap up the paperwork for the Latvia case. There were debriefings, and questions on his written report. He gave memories of some of the more important moments of the case, and sat in front of no less than three different tribunals, justifying his decisions. In the end, it was decided that everyone had acted as well as could be expected under the circumstances, and there had been no wrongdoing. The higher ups were able to close off the relations with Latvia with a sigh of relief: apparently the Latvian minister had been getting rather short with Kingsley Shacklebolt about the whole thing, much to everyone’s annoyance.

In the back of his mind, the Malfoy case kept niggling at him. At first, he dismissed it as the lingering remains of a schoolboy rivalry. He told himself that he had been right about Malfoy all along, and he should feel, if not triumphant then at least satisfied about it. If anything, though, that only made him feel worse. Then he wondered if the problem was that he had not been the one to arrest Malfoy, but the idea of breaching the uneasy peace that he and Malfoy had brokered over the years was equally distasteful. More than once, he almost asked Welling about it but thought better of it at the last moment. She had seemed so pleased with herself when she talked about it, and he didn’t want to face that either.

In the end, he ended up sending out a request for a copy of the file, and, no doubt helped by the goodwill he had accrued on the Latvia case, the file flapped into his office on Friday afternoon, the week after he had come back.

He glanced at Welling’s desk, but she was off giving a briefing about a suspect in a string of kidnappings in Wales. He flipped open the folder. 

The first thing in the file was Malfoy’s mugshot, just as it had been in the Prophet. Looking at it more closely now, Harry was struck by how tired Malfoy looked. He was thinner than the last time Harry had seen him, his already sharp features almost gaunt. His gaze, meeting Harry’s through the camera, held the familiar touch of arrogance, but it was tinged with exhaustion and a faint desperation. As Harry had noticed in the Prophet, Malfoy had let his hair grow long, and a strand of it kept falling across his face. He scowled and brushed it back

Harry put the picture aside and looked at the case report.

Most of it confirmed what Skeeter had written. Albert Shrew was a local shop owner whom Malfoy had quarreled with. The file noted that Malfoy told the police it was over the price of the shop building, which the Malfoy estate owned, and which Shrew had wanted to buy out for much less than it was actually worth. Shrew’s body had been found on the night of September twenty-fifth, dead for only about two hours. Malfoy’s wand was found hidden behind a baseboard that had been pried away, and _Priori incantato_ indicated that it was the wand that had performed the killing curse. Malfoy insisted, however, that the wand had been stolen from him a week before and in fact had reported it so. Owsley and Welling seemed to find it more likely that Malfoy had falsely reported it missing.

Harry pulled out a transcript of Malfoy’s interrogation and glanced over it briefly. Near the top, there was a reference number that corresponded to where a memory of the interrogation would be stored down in the evidence room. He closed the file and shoved it into his bag.

“Where you off to?” Ron asked, as Harry stood up.

“Evidence,” Harry answered, evasively. “Just checking a memory of something.”

Ron waved a hand at him, and returned to poring over a map of southern London, marking off buildings in red ink.

The evidence room was a couple hallways over, and empty when Harry got there. He pulled the file from his bag to check the reference number. Near the front, among the other open cases, a box sat on a high shelf. He took it down carefully, as the things inside shifted.

The vial with the memory was in the box, along with Draco’s wand and various other bagged bits of evidence taken from the scene of the crime. In Harry's opinion, after collecting months of evidence for the Latvia case, it all seemed rather sparse to arrest someone on. He looked through it idly: several photos of the body, some loose change that had been on the counter, the smashed remains of a glass with a bit of dried blood, and a single silver button, that the bag noted had not belonged to any of the victim’s clothes.

He took the vial out of the box and walked over to where a Pensieve was set up in the back of the room. The memory poured out slowly, and swirled in the stone basin. Harry leaned forward, bracing himself for the odd, familiar feeling of entering a memory.

As the memory took shape around him, he landed in one of the black interrogation rooms, down on the lower levels. This particular one, he recognized as number five, from the faint burn marks in the upper left corner, and the wobble of the table. Owsley and Welling sat on one side of the table, neither saying anything, and Malfoy sat, hands still bound behind him, on the other side, looking far too composed for a man in his position. Harry stood between them, looking back and forth.

Owsley spoke first. “Listen, Malfoy, we don’t have any other suspects. You’re going down for this whether you admit to it or not."

“Unfortunately,” Malfoy drawled, “just because you can’t think of another suspect, that does not mean I am guilty. Please, don’t punish me for your poor investigative skills.”

“We found your wand at the scene,” Owsley said, affably enough. “You were seen by multiple witnesses arguing with Mr Shrew prior to his murder.”

“I reported my wand stolen, and Mr Shrew and I had a small dispute over the value of the shop, that is all.”

“Obviously not all, as he wound up dead.” Owsley pulled a photo of Shrew’s body from the folder in front of him and slid it over to Malfoy. Malfoy said nothing, but pressed his lips together and looked away from the photo. “You may have been acquitted for your part in the war,” Owsley said, “but we all know where your allegiance lies, and we all know your feelings on muggles and muggleborns. Did you know Mr Shrew’s mother was a squib?”

Malfoy nodded curtly. “Yes, his grandmother worked at the manor in my great-grandfather’s time.”

“Did it bother you? Having a bloodline where magic ran out so close to your home?”

Malfoy scoffed. “My views on blood status have changed significantly since the war. I believe that should be clear from the records of my charitable donations over the past several years.”

“That’s not a ‘no.’”

“No, it did not bother me that Mr Shrew’s mother had been a squib,” Malfoy said, irritably. “It didn’t even particularly bother me that we had a disagreement over the shop. We argued about it, but he was a nice enough man otherwise.”

Harry circled the table, inspecting Malfoy. He was wearing a jumper over a collared shirt, and he looked more annoyed than nervous. Whoever had bound his hands had done it more tightly than necessary. The tips of his fingers were tinged faintly blue. His white blond hair was longer than Harry had ever seen it, and a little bit mussed up, which made him look more human, if Harry had to put a word to it. His slate gray eyes were shuttered. Harry couldn’t read whatever emotion lurked behind them.

“Tell me, Auror Owsley,” Malfoy said, leaning forward toward the table. “Did you actually consider that it might not be me, or was your rather rote thought process more along the lines of ‘Well, it’s a dead man in Wiltshire, so who could it be but that Draco Malfoy?’”

“Your wand was found hidden near the body,” Owsley said.

“That’s not a ‘no,’” Malfoy echoed, with a sardonic grin.

“Do you think this is funny?” Welling asked, speaking up for the first time. Malfoy looked at her, startled, and Harry, observing, did too. Her face wore an odd expression, more intense than Harry had seen on her. Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shone, bright and dark and sharp, like bits of flint. “Mr Malfoy, acquitted or not, you have a record as a former Death Eater. Reported stolen or not, it was your wand that was found at the scene of the crime. There is not a court in Magical Britain that will not like you for this. Mummy and Daddy can’t save you from this bind. In fact, I imagine you’ll see your father rather soon.”

Malfoy’s expression changed as she spoke, the smirk fading, and his eyes going steely. He still didn’t look nervous, but Harry imagined Malfoy hadn’t looked properly nervous in years. “I am not my father. And contort the evidence however much you like, I will swear under Veritaserum that _I did not do this._ ”

The memory of the interrogation was Owsley’s and, as such, colored by his impressions of it all. He remembered Malfoy as cold and arrogant, so Malfoy looked cold and arrogant. Therefore, his conviction of Malfoy’s guilt must have flickered, just for a moment, as Malfoy spoke, because in that moment, Harry saw Malfoy entirely differently. There was a hole near the collar of his sweater, as if moths had gotten to it, and dark smudges beneath his eyes. His eyes weren’t shuttered or steely at all, but resigned. His shoulders were uncharacteristically rounded, and his lips were cracked, like he’d been worrying at them before the interrogation had begun. Here was the exhaustion that Harry had noticed in the mugshot. Here was the desperation. Harry felt an uncharacteristic pang of compassion for Malfoy.

Welling spoke. “Personally, I think that the Dark Mark ought to be enough to put you away. It’s certainly enough proof that yes, Malfoy, you are just like your father.”

The compassion vanished. The memory snapped back into focus, as it had been before. Malfoy looked again as he had before, sharp, unforgiving edges and the cool pride of someone convinced they were better than the rest of the world. There was plenty more to the memory, but Harry could read the transcript, and he couldn’t remain in the dark interrogation for a moment longer. He pulled back and up, out of the memory.

For a moment, he didn’t move. He just stood, clutching the sides of the Pensieve and thinking about the interrogation. None of the rest was as important as that one moment when the perspective had shifted. Memories were too subjective, like reading a Rita Skeeter article, and he couldn’t trust the fine details, about how someone looked or acted. But Malfoy’s voice still echoed in his mind.

_I will swear under Veritaserum that I did not do this._

He stood abruptly, suddenly annoyed with himself for wasting time on this. It wasn’t his case. It wasn’t any of his business. He had a case, delivered to his desk this morning, one of the hundreds of cold cases left from the war that had to be finished and closed. It didn’t do any good to obsess over Malfoy like he was at Hogwarts again, when he should be getting started on the new case, looking into the death of a pair of muggleborns.

With the tip of his wand, he fished the memory out of the Pensieve and dropped it back into the vial. He reached up to return to the vial to the evidence box, and then hesitated. Perhaps he could take it with him, and look over it again at home over the weekend. See if there was anything more to see from it. He shook his head, feeling stupid and childish. If the vial was discovered missing there would be a whole investigation, and he could get into quite a bit of trouble himself. Besides, he had the transcript.

He dropped the vial back into the box.

 

* * *

 

At the Burrow on Sunday, Harry sat, curled up in a worn armchair, biting his thumbnail and brooding over the Malfoy case file, which he had found, still shoved in his bag. He was reading through the interrogation transcript for the third time.

It went mostly in circles, Owsley and Welling both pushing Malfoy to admit that he had killed Shrew, and Malfoy steadfastly denying it. It was easier to be objective, reading the transcript rather than observing the memory. Malfoy pushed back at the Aurors often enough, needling them, but for the most part he was polite and direct, and nothing he said gave any indication that he had been involved with the murder. In and of itself, of course, that proved nothing, but Harry was strongly reminded of sneaking into the Slytherin common room, second year, convinced that Malfoy was the heir of Slytherin, only for Malfoy to blithely deny it. 

He sighed and rubbed his forehead. Ginny, having come in when he wasn’t looking, raised her eyebrows at him. “What’s wrong?”

“Just looking at a case.” He flipped the folder closed. A mischievous glint appeared in Ginny’s eye, and she reached over and plucked the folder from Harry’s hands. Harry gave it up to her without much protest.

“You know, Mum says no one’s allowed to work on Sundays. She won’t even let me talk about Quidditch,” Ginny complained. She flipped the folder open, and looked in surprise at Malfoy’s mugshot. “You’re on the Malfoy case?”

“I’m not,” Harry said. He reached over and tried to grab the folder back, but she moved back out of his reach, looking over the case notes. “Technically that’s classified, and I could get sacked for showing you it.”

“Yeah, cause I’m running off to show it all to Skeeter.” Ginny rolled her eyes. “Why do you have it if you’re not on the case?”

 Harry shrugged. “Just looking into it.”

“What, are you jealous you weren’t the one to bring him in?” Ginny grinned. “Next time, don’t go to Latvia.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, thanks. Anyway, no, I’m not jealous.” Harry pulled out his wand from his pocket and pointed at the file. “ _Accio_.” The file flew out of Ginny’s hand and landed in Harry’s lap, papers ruffling. “It just doesn’t feel right.”

Ginny settled onto the couch, pulling a lumpy afghan around her shoulders. “It’s Malfoy,” she said with distaste.

Something in her tone annoyed him, and he snapped, more sharply than he intended, “Just because it’s Malfoy doesn’t mean he did it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You think he didn’t do it?”

Harry hesitated. He hadn’t actually let himself think that far along, although it was the logical conclusion of everything he had been thinking. It seemed too convenient, that Malfoy’s wand would turn up, in the same room as the body, no less. Why would any wizard leave their wand behind like that? And there had been something, in that moment when the memory flickered, in the dark circles under Malfoy’s eyes and in his moth-eaten jumper and in the tone of his voice when he offered to swear under Veritaserum, that made Harry want to believe him. Not entirely, but just enough to doubt.

“I’m not sure,” Harry said, slowly. “I think, that if you’d asked me a few years ago, of course I would’ve believed that he did it. But I think regardless, people are just assuming because he’s a Malfoy, and that’s not entirely fair.”

Ginny hummed under her breath, thinking. “Well, what are you going to do about it then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re not just going to sit around brooding on it, are you?” 

“No.” Harry hesitated again. “I suppose I ought to ask to get moved to the case. Welling won’t like that, though.” He grimaced. “And it’ll be a nightmare of red tape.”

“Harry Potter, saviour of the wizarding world,” Ginny said, grinning, “reduced to worrying about bureaucracy like the rest of us mortals. What happened to your guerrilla warfare spirit?”

Harry leaned back in the chair. It was a thought. There was no reason he couldn’t go about investigating the Malfoy case on his own, other than that his superiors might not like it. But Ginny was right. When had he started worrying about what his superiors would and would not like? After Latvia, he should have earned some slack. He’d even managed to file all the paperwork correctly. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe, I’ll see if I can’t find some time to go speak to Malfoy myself.”

Ginny pulled a face. “Better you than me. If I never speak to Malfoy again, it’ll be too soon.”

Harry laughed, and got up to get a butterbeer.


	2. A due

Draco sat with his back against the wall of his cell, trying to rub some warmth back into his hands. The blanket they’d given him was so thin and threadbare, it could hardly be afforded the dignity of being called a blanket. With the weather growing colder, the fortress was only getting increasingly drafty. The Aurors who patrolled the prison all had thick robes and warming charms, but the prisoners wore rags and little more. He’d hardly slept the past few nights for shivering, and he’d developed a deep, wet cough. The ministry and ex-Order members had bragged for months about the humanitarian reforms at the prison after the war, and though he was grateful for the lack of Dementors, he sincerely hoped that the reforms included not letting prisoners die of exposure during the winter.

Anyway, he thought, it wasn’t like they needed the Dementors in this place. Idly, he wondered if somehow the length of their presence had left something tangible in the walls, something still sucking every happy thought out of the fortress. The Aurors, making their rounds, scowled at him and made a point of shouting him awake if he had actually managed to drop off to sleep. He thought he recognized some faces among the Aurors, people a year below or above him at Hogwarts, maybe. Sometimes he thought he was imagining it.

Except for his mother’s visit, in the first days of his imprisonment—she had only managed the one—he hadn’t spoken to anyone since they had finished with his interrogation and brought him here. It was maddening.

He heard the other inmates yelling out sometimes. Some of them screamed that the Dark Lord would return. More often than not he recognized the voices. Others demanded to be let out, or cursed the guards. There was one inmate, not too far from Draco, who just laughed, high and keening and manic, night after night.

Maybe the Dementors hadn’t left anything behind but the prisoners, long ago gone mad.

Somewhere in it all, rotting away in the same damnable prison, was his father. Draco had never come to visit. Part of him had hated Lucius, hated him more than he had ever known it was possible to hate someone, more than he hated Aunt Bellatrix, or You-Know-Who himself. Part of him, the same cowardly part that always held him back from doing the things he knew he should do, had just been scared to see his father in a place like this. It had taken him long enough to decide his father was wrong about things; to see his father broken and imprisoned would have been too much.

Well, look at him now.

The days passed slowly, indistinguishably. He knew the exact number of steps that it took to pace along the walls of his cell. He was itching for more space, or a place where he could hide away from the eyes of the guards as they passed. He hated the feeling of constantly being watched. It reminded him too much of the occupation of the manor, when there had been prying eyes everywhere, everyone ready to sell each other out to curry just a little bit of favor. At least then, he had been able to escape to the gardens and the grounds and all the secret paths he’d carved out as a child, that only he knew.

A bail had been set when he was arrested, five hundred thousand galleons, which in the old days would have been a drop in the well of the Malfoy fortune, but these days represented the majority of it. He had expressly forbidden his mother from posting his bail. Once he was free, she would want him to flee Britain and doing so would bankrupt the estate. He didn’t exactly have faith in the wizarding justice system, and much less faith that his mother would maintain the manor if he were to be imprisoned long-term, but at least that would ensure that she had the money to live comfortably on the continent.

Mostly right now, he just missed the fireplace, and Franny bringing in fresh tea.

There came the sound of footsteps from the corridor. He ignored them, preoccupied, now that he had warmed his fingers sufficiently, with finding a way to wrap the blanket around himself so he could, little by little, warm the rest of himself. He was beginning to suspect that it was impossible.

The footsteps stopped in front of his cell. He looked up.

An Auror stood in front of him, his dark hair wild, his brown face unreadable, and his green eyes achingly, and annoyingly, familiar.

“Come to gloat, Potter?” Draco asked, summoning as much of his habitual drawl as he could muster, while curled up and shivering on the floor.

“I don’t gloat,” Potter said. There wasn’t much heat behind it, as if he said it more out of reflex than anything else. Interesting, that. “Why the hell haven’t they given you more blankets?”

Draco shrugged. “I don’t think they like Malfoys around here.”

“I’ll speak to someone.” Potter was looking around, like he might go off to yell at someone right this moment. Draco found it impossibly irritating.

“What do you want?”

Potter looked back down at him, startled. “I can’t have this conversation like this, with you on the floor. I shouldn’t have come here. I should have gotten them to bring you back into one of the interrogation rooms.”

“Because that’s so much less condescending.” Annoyed, Draco pushed himself to his feet, drawing the blanket around his shoulders imperiously. “Potter, tell me why the fuck you’re here, or bugger off.”

Potter fixed him with a bright stare that was, Draco thought, utterly unfair. “I’m here unofficially, Malfoy. Nothing you say is on the record.”

“Brilliant,” Draco said. “So, if I tell you to take whatever aspect of your saviour complex this is and fuck right off, you won’t tell anyone?”

Potter shot him an unamused look. “No. So you can answer truthfully. I’ll get to the point. Did you kill Shrew?”

Draco drew himself up, and looked down his nose at Potter. It wasn’t easy to look proud while huddled in a blanket in a prison cell, but he’d be damned if he didn’t try. He was slightly taller than Potter, he noted triumphantly. “I did not.”

Potter looked thoughtful for a moment. Draco could feel his gaze, taking everything about him in, and his cheeks burned a little bit at the thought that Potter of all people should see him in this state. Even during his trial after the war, he’d been bathed and dressed and presentable by the time that Potter saw him. What did it matter what Potter thought, though? Potter had been convinced he was guilty of every imaginable sin since they were eleven years old.

“All right,” Potter said eventually. “I believe you.”

Draco felt his eyebrows reach new and exciting heights. That was unexpected. “I’m sorry?”

“I believe you. I believe that you didn’t kill Albert Shrew,” Potter repeated. He refused to break eye contact with Draco, and at last, unable to bear that searching and guileless gaze, Draco turned away, pacing his cell restlessly.

“Well, that’s fantastic. You can show up as a character witness at my trial again; although, I’m not sure that trick will work twice,” Draco said, sarcastically.

“I was thinking more along the lines of posting your bail,” Potter said.

He certainly had the money, which stung quite a bit, and Draco scowled, his pride pricked. “Not worried I’ll just skip off to the continent on you?” he asked.

“Will you?”

“I might,” Draco said, just for the sake of being perverse.

“But will you?” Potter was looking at him again, and he’d just said he actually believed that Draco was innocent, to the point where he was willing to post his bail, which was all too ridiculous to be believed.

“You can’t post my bail, Potter,” Draco said, stiffly.

“It’s my money, I don’t see why I can’t. As long as you show up to the trial, I’ll get it back.”

“Why do you care?”

Potter moved closer, and looked for a moment like he might reach a hand out, through the bars and touch Draco. Draco drew back. Potter seemed to realize what he had been doing, suddenly, and stopped, wavering an awkward distance away. “I vouched for you after the war because I thought you deserved a second chance. I don’t want to see that ruined by something you didn’t do.”

“I don’t owe you anything,” Draco spat.

“No,” Potter agreed. It was infuriating.

“Why do you even believe me?”

Potter shrugged and shoved his hands deep in his pockets. “I’m not sure. Because you look like you’re telling the truth.”

Draco said nothing. He looked around at the small cell, and then back at Potter. The idea that Potter believed him not for any ulterior motives or hidden agenda, but because he genuinely thought Draco was telling the truth felt so foreign that he couldn’t quite accept it. He wanted to. He wanted to believe that the past eleven years could be undone for a moment, and Harry Potter could stand in front of him and take his word for something. He’d been wanting that for a very long time.

“Malfoy,” Potter said. “Let me get you out of here.”

Draco turned back to him and met his eye. “All right,” he said.

 

* * *

 

Harry waited outside of the prison, on the beach where the sea wind blew in sharp and cold. It was just a little past dawn, and the dinghy that had brought him out there was pulled up on the sand. The boatman lounged not far away, puffing on a cigarette.

Harry checked his watch for the fifth time. It was a quarter past seven. The Aurors should have come out with Malfoy a full fifteen minutes ago. He bit his lip, a thousand scenarios running through his mind, each more improbable than the last. He hadn’t actually told anyone he was doing this, not even as a hypothetical, which retrospectively felt rather stupid. He wasn’t even entirely sure why he was doing this himself. As much as he believed that Malfoy was innocent, which was a new and somewhat unsettling feeling, yesterday, he had been as arrogant and as sarcastic as ever, threatening to run off on his bail and leave Harry to foot the bill. It had taken all of Harry’s patience to stay calm in the face of the sheer ingratitude Malfoy was capable of.

Well, it was Harry’s money, at least, if this went wrong. He’d set up a trust for Teddy a while ago, so that was safe, and it wasn’t like Harry didn’t have two separate family fortunes to draw upon. He checked his watch again.

A door banged open, and Harry looked up. An Auror he knew vaguely, a witch named Junipers, was bringing Malfoy out. He was dressed in the same clothes he’d been wearing in the memory of the interrogation, and if he hadn’t been able to actually shower, it looked as if he had at least managed to acquire a comb to run through his hair.

“I wasn’t sure you’d actually do it,” Malfoy said, as he picked his way down across the rocks.

“I’m not a liar,” Harry said. He’d expended his patience the day before. The prospect of facing long weeks of Malfoy’s barbs loomed suddenly and terrifyingly.

“That’s not what I said.” Malfoy stopped in front of Harry.

“Get in the boat, Malfoy,” Harry said.

Malfoy smirked and did so. “I’m surprised my mother isn’t here with you.”

Harry paused, getting in behind Malfoy. “Er, I haven’t actually told her yet.”

Malfoy twisted to look at Harry. His eyes were wide and his features surprisingly open. It made him look younger. “You haven’t told her? Potter, I knew you had a death wish, but honestly, this is a bit much, even for you. Do you expect me to just show up at my house, ‘Hello, Mother, Potter paid my bail, and I’m back now’?”

“You’re not going back to your house,” Harry said, grimly. He finished climbing in behind Malfoy. The boatman snubbed out his cigarette and ambled over.

“Why not?” Malfoy demanded.

“The press has been camped out there since your arrest. I understand your mother has been terrorizing them rather badly, but they’re dogged when they smell blood in the water, especially Skeeter. Watch out for her. She’s an unregistered Animagus.”

The boatman pushed them off, and the dinghy bobbed unsteadily on the waves. It set off at a decent clip, the charms on it carrying it on the swiftest path to the mainland.

“Where do you expect me to stay, then? I’m not that keen on sleeping on the streets,” Malfoy shouted, over the wind and the water.

Honestly, now that he actually had to say it, the whole plan seemed rather poorly thought out. Malfoy would think he was being condescending and get all defensive about it, and Harry would be stuck with an irritated Slytherin until the trial. “My house is unplottable.”

“That’s great for you, Potter.”

Harry persisted. “You could stay there, and we could try and figure out who framed you for this.”

If anything, Malfoy looked faintly amused, which, had Harry not already realized the ridiculousness of the plan he was suggesting, would have been insulting. “I might prefer Azkaban.”

“It’s not too late for me to bring you back, if you don’t watch it,” Harry began hotly, and then stopped. It occurred to him belatedly that Malfoy had been joking. Sure enough, the corner of Malfoy’s mouth twitched.

“I’m not trying to be ungrateful,” Malfoy said. “But I really think I should go back to my own home. I give you my word that I’ll be at the trial. I’ll give you my word to stay on the estate until then, if you like.”

Harry shook his head. “Out of the question. The ministry was very reluctant to even let me pay the bail, until I threatened to bring Hermione in to yell at them about basic human rights.” Hermione would have done it too, he bet. She was still unhappy about the state of the wizarding penal system, and if Harry were to mention the state Azkaban had been in yesterday when he saw Malfoy, he was fairly sure she’d start crusading for further reforms. He made a note to talk to Ron about it before he brought it up around Hermione. “They only agreed after I swore to personally guarantee that you’d not harm anyone between now and the trial.”

Malfoy looked away, out across the gray sea. “Tell me at least that you’re not asking me to live with a bunch of Weasleys.”

The image sprang up of Malfoy sitting unhappily in the Burrow kitchen while the Weasleys edged around him. Harry grinned. “No. No Weasleys are living with me.”

“Weren’t you engaged to the girl Weasley?” Malfoy asked absently.

It surprised Harry that Malfoy knew that. Ginny and Harry had in fact been briefly engaged, about a year after the war ended, but then Ginny had joined the Harpies and gotten increasingly wrapped up in her team. It had ended, mutually enough, not too long after. “We broke up a while ago.”

“Oh,” Malfoy said. He sighed. “Well, I have to at least speak to my mother.”

“I’m hooked into the Floo network,” Harry said reluctantly. “I suppose you could call her.”

Malfoy fixed him with an incredulous look. “Potter, I am going to need to actually see my mother in person or she will come and find us, I don’t care how heavily warded your house is. Where do you live, anyway?”

“In London. All right, you can speak to your mother, but you will stay at my house. Can we agree on that?”

Malfoy nodded.

It was so utterly like Malfoy to need to go running off to speak to his mother immediately. Harry wondered if he was even capable of doing anything without one of his parents looking over his shoulder and telling him what to do. The whole plan was beginning to seem more and more idiotic. He should have at least spoken to Ron and Hermione about it before he acted, and if he weren’t so sure that Malfoy was innocent, there was no way that he would have done it. But when Malfoy had looked him in the eye and told him that he had not killed Shrew, there had been something in his eyes, something in the way he held himself, freezing and pale in that cell, an intensity and a desperation for someone to believe him, that Harry was too familiar with to ignore.

Malfoy was quiet enough for the rest of the boat ride. After a while, Harry noticed that he was shivering, and he realized that Malfoy didn’t have a wand on him and couldn’t cast even a basic warming charm on himself. As subtly as he could manage, he aimed one at Malfoy’s back. As it caught, Malfoy turned to look back at Harry but didn’t say anything.

The water was rough, but they were moving with the tide and soon enough they coasted into shallow water and the boatman hopped out to drag the boat ashore. Malfoy clambered out and went to wait a little way away while Harry tipped the boatman a few sickles.

Malfoy stood at the top of a sparse sand dune, facing away from the ocean. The wind whipped his hair around and into his face, but he didn’t seem to notice, squinting off into the distance. Harry hung back for a moment and observed him. No doubt, Malfoy wouldn’t entirely trust him, which was not unfair; Harry didn’t particularly trust Malfoy either. He was hesitant about allowing him to speak to his mother, but mostly because that would entail letting Narcissa Malfoy into Grimmauld Place. He was fairly certain Malfoy wouldn’t try to run off, especially not without a wand.

He should get Kreacher to make them a good lunch when they got home. Malfoy had a hungry look about him.

Harry climbed up the sand dune.

"What day is it?" Malfoy asked, not looking at him.

"November first," Harry said. "Friday."

Malfoy nodded.

“We’re going to Twelve Grimmauld Place. I'll Apparate us there.” He expected Malfoy to push back on that, or bring up again the argument of where he would be staying, but he just took Harry’s arm. It was odd. Harry didn’t think he could remember Malfoy ever actually touching him. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant.

He turned sharply on his heel and Disapparated.

They reappeared with a pop, and Harry hoped none of the neighbours had happened to be looking out their windows. Malfoy took his hand from Harry’s arm. “This is the Black house,” he observed, as Grimmauld Place pushed its way out from between the two neighbouring houses. “You live at the Black house?”

“Sirius left it to me,” Harry said. “The Order used it for a while.”

Malfoy snorted. “I’m sure Walburga Black is spinning in her grave.”

“Did you know her?” Harry asked, surprised.

“She was my Great-Aunt,” Malfoy said. “I saw her at family gatherings until I was five, and then I had to attend her funeral, which was a nightmare. Almost the entire Black family attended. Of course, we were all more preoccupied with the people who didn’t…” Malfoy trailed off.

Harry snorted. “There’s a portrait of her in the entrance hall that starts screaming if we draw back the curtains. We can’t get it to come down.”

“Yes, that sounds like her.”

Harry led the way up the front steps, and opened the door. “There,” he said, pointing down the hallway to where the portrait sat quietly behind some curtains. “Please, don’t wake her, though.”

Malfoy wasn’t paying attention. “I see you’ve gotten rid of the house elf heads.”

“Yeah, Kreacher wasn’t thrilled about that, but he got over it. Speaking of,” Harry pulled his coat off and hung it up on the coatrack by the door. “Kreacher! We have a guest!”

The old house-elf hurried down the hall. “Hello, Master Harry!” He caught sight of Malfoy, and his eyes shone. His tone turned simpering. “Master Draco! Kreacher has not seen Master Draco since he was a small boy. How Master Draco has grown! The Mistress would have been proud. So much like Miss Cissy.”

“Hello, Kreacher.” Draco glanced at Harry uncomfortably. “I came here sometimes, when I was little,” he said, by way of explanation.

“Kreacher will go prepare Master Draco’s old favorites.” Kreacher looked at Harry for confirmation. Harry nodded, vaguely annoyed that, although Kreacher had become fiercely loyal to him over the past several years, he was instantly taken with Malfoy. Hermione had mentioned that Malfoy supported aspects her house elf reform bill.

“That’ll take him a bit,” he said to Malfoy. “I’ll show you where you’ll be staying. I made up the room last night.”

He led up the stairs to the third floor, where he and Kreacher had decided to put Malfoy the night before. “Tell me,” Malfoy said from behind him, eyeing an orange couch that could be seen from the drawing room. “Are all the décor changes you’ve made your ideas, or did the Weasleys have a hand?”

Harry didn’t bother looking back, and forced himself not to rise to the bait. “Are you just going to try and pick fights the entire time you’re here? That’s going to get old for both of us very fast.”

“Just a question.”

Harry put Malfoy in a bedroom on the third floor, a room away from his own. He pointed out the loo as he went, and Malfoy commented that he’d like to bathe before he spoke to his mother. Harry waved him off. “Do whatever you want. Kreacher will keep the food warm. I’ll send an owl to your mum?”

“No, I’d better do it,” Malfoy said. “If she’s coming here, I’ll ask her to get Franny to pack a trunk of some of my things.”

Harry shrugged. “There’s parchment in the desk in your room. Give it to me when you’re done—I need to be the one to write the address.”

Malfoy raised an eyebrow at him.

“The house is under the Fidelius charm,” Harry explained.

“That seems a bit paranoid, even for you.”

Harry glared at Malfoy’s deliberately needling tone. “Shockingly, there are some people who still want me dead.”

Malfoy said nothing in response to that, but walked over to the desk and pulled out a sheet of parchment. He scribbled something brief on it, and then handed it back to Harry. “Here, then.”

Harry resisted the urge to read it over, figuring he owed Malfoy at least some privacy. He took the quill from Malfoy and wrote neatly at the bottom, “Harry Potter’s address is 12 Grimmauld Place.”

“I’ll send it out, then,” he said. Malfoy had his back to him and didn’t answer.

 

* * *

 

Draco came downstairs about an hour and a half later, still pink from his bath. He regretted that he didn’t have any fresh clothes to put on, but hopefully his mother would bring some as he had asked. It felt good to be clean and warm again, after the freezing filth of Azkaban. He dawdled for a while in the room Harry had assigned to him, poking into corners and opening the wardrobe and generally snooping. When the house had belonged to the Blacks, there had always been some nasty surprise waiting for over-curious guests, but now everything seemed benign to the point that it might have been muggle. It rankled to be stuck in Potter’s house. He could almost hear his mother’s voice in his head, horrified that Potter, of all people, had ended up in possession of her ancestral home.

Eventually though, enough was enough, and Draco wandered down into the kitchen on the ground floor, drawn by the smells of food and a wood-burning fire. Kreacher had laid out a variety of foods on the table, most of which he recognized as his childhood favorites. Among other things, a large platter of golden fish and chips steamed enticingly, and a bowl of spun sugar fairies gleamed in the light. If Kreacher had made anything for Potter, he’d already eaten it. A pot of tea kept itself warm next to where Potter was sitting, paging through the Daily Prophet. He didn’t look up when Draco came in.

Beside the tea, there was a half-finished letter on the table, which Draco tried to surreptitiously read upside down. He could make out that it was addressed to Weasley and Granger, but not much else.

Draco sat down across from Potter and forked several of the pieces of fish onto a plate.

“Thank you for getting me released,” he said, just for something to break the silence.

Harry put down the paper. He didn’t say anything for a moment, but his eyes raked over Draco, measuring. Like in the prison, Draco felt abruptly self-conscious and hoped that Potter hadn’t noticed the small hole near the collar of his jumper. He tugged at his sleeve to cover where the tail of his Dark Mark was visible. Potter cleared his throat after a moment and said, “Your mother will be here soon.”

“Yes, we should talk about that.” Draco put his fork down on his plate and forced himself to meet Potter’s eyes. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What do you mean?” asked Potter, taken aback.

“I mean,” Draco said, patiently, “even if you do think I’m innocent, even if you bought into Dumbledore’s ridiculous, frankly dangerous obsession with doling out unwarranted second chances, what possible reason are you going to give to my mother that doesn’t sound like you’re doing it because you want us to be in your debt?”

Harry leaned back in his chair. “You don’t owe me,” he said, as if that solved the entire problem.

Draco rolled his eyes. “Well, obviously not.”

“And I’m not doing this because I owe you anything,” Potter added.

That was more unexpected. That made it sound like Potter did owe him for something. Gryffindors honestly had no sense of subtlety. Curiosity got the better of him. “What in Merlin’s name would you owe me for?”

Potter scratched under the collar of his shirt, exposing a prominent collarbone. “Not you, I guess. Your mother, perhaps.”

Draco leaned across the table with interest. “What do you mean, Potter?”

“She saved my life in the battle,” Potter said, in what Draco considered far too nonchalant a voice for speaking of life and death matters. Potter picked up his cup of tea and looked down at it, but then looked back up at Draco through his lashes. It made quite the picture. “She checked to see if Voldemort,” Draco flinched slightly at the name, “had killed me, and then she lied to his face and told him I was dead.”

Though he hadn’t known it before, the idea that his mother would and could lie to the Dark Lord was not surprising. Frankly, it was almost overshadowed by the way Potter spoke about getting killed by the Dark Lord as if it were nothing. Draco still woke up from nightmares of a tall figure in dark robes stalking through the manor, or spun around in the middle of the corridor thinking he’d heard the awful dry sound of a snake moving behind him. The idea that Potter wasn’t bothered by literally being murdered was the most disgustingly Gryffindor thing he’d ever encountered, but that thought was immediately followed by Draco remembering the end of every school year at Hogwarts, when rumors had sprung up about whatever ridiculous thing Potter and his friends had done to win the house cup and that glint in Dumbledore’s cold, blue eyes. Eleven years old and defending the Philosophers Stone. Twelve and defeating a basilisk. Fifteen and fighting, among others, Draco’s own father after breaking into the Ministry of Magic. The realization that perhaps Potter was just used to things like almost being killed by a magical terrorist trickled down the back of his spine like ice water.

Potter continued, “She asked if you were still alive. I said you were, and she turned around and lied to Voldemort.”

“You don’t owe her for that,” Draco said, quietly. He vividly remembered Potter and his friends saving his life not once, but twice during the battle.

Potter made an amused sound. “Your mother seems to think differently. She’s brought it up several times in the past few years when she’s been in the country and has wanted something, usually to visit your father in prison. I thought I might tell her that this is me repaying her at last.”

“How Slytherin of you.”

Potter took a sip of his tea and made a face. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“Take it how you like,” Draco drawled, eating his fish. “My mother will like the excuse though, even if she doesn’t believe it.”

“I don’t care all that much if she believes it, as long as she accepts it.”

They fell silent, Draco awkwardly trying to eat as much as he could without looking impolite. Potter went back to looking through the paper. The only sound in the kitchen was the ticking of Potter’s watch, and the clink of Draco’s fork.

Draco made a point to look just about anywhere other than at Potter’s face: he counted the cupboards, of which there were twenty-three, and then inspected the cutlery, which was cheap. He kept coming back to Potter, though, and the way a line appeared between his eyes, just below his scar, as he read. After years of craning across the Great Hall to yell insults at each other, he felt uncomfortable sitting across from him and eating his food.

The fire flared suddenly green. Potter checked his watch. “Your mother is very punctual,” he commented.

Narcissa Malfoy appeared in the flames and stepped gracefully out of the grate.

Her eyes swept over Potter, taking in how he was lounging, the paper in his hands, and then Draco, who was sitting as straight as he had been taught as a child, chin tilted up. “Hello, Mother.”

“Hello, Draco, darling,” Narcissa said. She set a rather large case on the table. “I have brought you what you asked, although I don’t understand why you need it.”

“Mrs Malfoy,” Potter said, standing up. He offered her his hand to shake. She looked at it for a moment and quirked an eyebrow. Potter took his hand back, and rubbed it on his pants awkwardly. “Thank you for coming.”

“You’ve managed to surprise me, Mr Potter,” she said. “Please don’t think me rude, but I can’t quite fathom why you’ve done it.”

“This will shock you as much as it did me,” Draco said, “but Potter thinks I’m innocent.”

“Of course, you are,” Narcissa said. “Anyone with a brain could see that.”

“Would you like some tea?” Potter offered.

“No, thank you,” she said. She looked around the kitchen as if she didn’t trust anything in it. Draco smothered a laugh.

“I believe that paying Draco’s bail should fulfill any debt I owe to you?” Potter said.

Narcissa smiled disbelievingly. “How very Slytherin of you.”

“That’s what your son said.”

“Well, debt or no debt, I thank you for your help, and I will be taking Draco home now.” She gestured for Draco to stand.

Harry held up a hand. “I’m afraid not, Mrs Malfoy. It was a condition of his release that I,” he paused, searching for a word, “supervise until his trial.”

Narcissa wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something distasteful. “If you must, then you could come and stay at the manor. We have the space.”

“I think,” Draco put in, thinking of the many moldy and unused rooms in the manor, “that after his last experience there, Potter might not be too keen on returning to Malfoy Manor.”

“Don’t be crude, Draco.” Narcissa snapped. She didn’t like it when Draco alluded to the occupation, although he was sure that was why she herself had spent as little time as possible in the manor for the past several years. “I’m sure Mr Potter can overcome it.”

“Regardless,” Potter said, “the press is waiting just outside your door. Imagine the headlines if Skeeter found out about that. You know she’d twist that somehow.”

“And how do you suppose it will look when word gets out that Draco has been released but hasn’t come home?” Narcissa demanded. “People will assume he’s left the country.”

“I’ll put in some key appearances,” Draco said.

Narcissa turned to him. “Don’t tell me you think this is a good idea.”

Draco bit his lip. “I think that Potter paid my bail, which he did not have to do, and I think that if I am to have a shot at proving that I am innocent, I’m going to have to discover whoever it was who actually murdered Mr Shrew. Whatever else I have to say for them, Potter and his friends are obnoxiously good at sniffing out and solving mysteries, and they do have the resources of the Aurors at their disposal.”

“We have the family lawyer for that,” Narcissa said.

“And that worked so well for Father?” Draco said. “Or are you forgetting that it was only Potter’s testimony that got me acquitted after the war?”

“I testified for you, as well, Mrs Malfoy,” Potter said, quietly.

Draco looked at Potter, surprised and taken a bit aback. Potter wasn’t looking at him, though, his bright eyes focused entirely on Narcissa.

Draco hadn’t actually gone to his mother’s trial. He’d been awaiting his own at the time, and she had requested that he not be present. He had thought she just hadn’t wanted him there should she be convicted, and, when she’d been acquitted, he had assumed that Aunt Andromeda vouched for her. In light of what Potter had told him earlier, he supposed it made sense that Potter would have also spoken for her. He adjusted his mental measure of Potter.

Narcissa pursed her lips, considering.

“This isn’t your decision, Mother,” Draco said. If he were being honest, which he rarely was, he didn’t particularly want to stay with Potter either, but, even if he wasn’t saying so, it was obvious the lengths that Potter had gone through to secure Draco’s release. And there was something to Potter, something to Potter’s belief in his innocence, that made a small and hopeful part of Draco stir and take notice.

“You’re really agreeing to this?” she asked him.

“I am.”

She regarded Potter for a long moment. “If my son goes to prison, there will be hell to pay,” she told him. “Innocent men have ended up in Azkaban before.”

“I know that,” Potter said. “Look at where we’re standing, Mrs Malfoy, remember how it ended up mine, and believe me, I know that.”

“I gather I’m not needed here, then, other than to drop off Draco’s things?” she asked archly.

“Don’t be like that, Mother. I wanted you to know that I was safe,” Draco said.

Her expression softened slightly. “You’re a good boy.”

“You could stay for lunch, if you’d like,” Potter said. “I don’t know that we were going to do anything formal, but I could ask Kreacher.”

Narcissa sneered. “No, I wouldn’t want to put you to the trouble. Draco, come see me if you need anything more than what I’ve brought.”

“Thank you,” Draco said. 

“Floo powder?” Narcissa asked.

Potter pointed at the pot. “On the mantle.”

She threw a pinch into the flames, stepped in, neatly pronounced, “Malfoy Manor,” and disappeared. After a moment, the flames returned to a cheerful yellow.

Draco and Potter sat in the kitchen without saying anything. At last, Draco stood, and took the case from the table. “I’m tired,” he announced. “Excuse me.”

Potter waved him off. “I’ll send Kreacher with more food a bit later.” As Draco left the kitchen, he heard Potter get up and start collecting the dishes.

 

* * *

 

Harry had tried writing a letter to Ron and Hermione, to explain what he had done and why, but abandoned it halfway through. In the end, he just threw some Floo powder into the fire that evening and stuck his head through.

Ron and Hermione weren’t in the living room when he got through, but he could hear sounds coming from the kitchen. “Hermione!” he called out. “Ron!”

The sounds in the kitchen paused, he heard voices, and a moment later Ron came into the room and crouched down beside the fire. “Is something wrong?”

“No,” Harry said. “But I need to talk to the two of you. Where’s Hermione?”

“She’s just doing the washing up,” Ron gestured over his shoulder at the kitchen. “Do you want to come through properly?”

“No, probably better if you come through to mine,” Harry said. “I shouldn’t leave unannounced right now.”

“What does that mean? Do you have someone over?” Ron grinned.

“Not like you’re thinking. Get Hermione and come through.”

“Yeah, all right, mate. We’ll be there in a few.”

Harry pulled his head back into his own house, and sat back on his heels. It would take them a bit to come. He called for Kreacher. “Where’s the good whiskey?” he asked him when he emerged from his bedroom in the pantry.

“The firewhiskey or the muggle?” Kreacher asked. Kreacher disapproved of muggle whiskey, as he disapproved of muggle anything, even though Harry insisted that there was nothing inherently magical about firewhiskey, and tended to hide it in places Harry couldn’t find. He would go and get it when Harry asked him to, but he had yet to give up the location of his hiding spot.

“The muggle.”

Kreacher grumbled, but went off to fetch it from wherever he’d put it. Harry got out three glasses from the cupboard, trying to decide whether Ron would prefer to be drunk before or after Harry told him that he had Draco Malfoy living in his house.

Before, probably.

Kreacher brought out the whiskey, set it on the table, and walked away, muttering darkly. Harry poured some into each glass. He downed his own quickly, and then poured himself a second. The fire flared green, and Ron stumbled out.

“That was quick,” Harry said.

Ron shrugged. “Hermione’ll be along in a moment.”

Wordlessly, Harry passed him the whiskey.

Ron raised his eyebrows. “You’re making me nervous.”

“Just drink it.”

Ron did, eyeing Harry suspiciously. Hermione emerged from the fireplace a moment later. Harry passed her a glass too.

“Ron didn’t say what this is about,” Hermione said. She dusted herself off and sat, taking a sip of her whiskey.

“Harry’s being very mysterious about the whole thing,” Ron said. “I think he found something the Blacks left behind in the house, its possessed him, and now he’s gone mad.”

Harry ignored Ron. “You remember how Malfoy was arrested?”

“Yeah, of course,” Ron said.

“Hermione, you remember how you thought it seemed odd?”

“Yes,” Hermione said, more tentatively.

Harry nudged Ron’s shin with his foot. “Sit, and drink.”

“Uh-oh.”

“I did some investigating of my own.”

“Welling won’t like that,” Ron commented.

“Wait, it gets worse.” Harry took a deep breath. “Something was bothering me about it, the wand thing, and what you said, Hermione, about it seeming out of character for Malfoy to kill someone.”

Hermione nodded. “You said that too. You pointed out he didn’t have the nerve to kill Professor Dumbledore, when it came right down to it.”

“Well, I went into evidence the other week, and I looked at the memory of his interrogation and something felt off there too, so I went to see him in Azkaban.”

Ron made a face. “So that’s where you went yesterday. I was wondering. Was he as much of a prat as ever?”

“No,” Harry said, thoughtfully. Malfoy had been prickly over the past couple days, but no more than could really be expected from anyone in his position. For Malfoy, actually, he’d been downright friendly. “No, he wasn’t. He looked tired, and scared. And cold. Hermione, remind me to talk to you about the conditions in Azkaban. Anyway, I asked him if he did it.”

“Well, it’s not hard to guess what he said to that,” Ron scoffed. “Harry, the only meaningful interaction we’ve ever had with Malfoy was when Hermione punched him in the face third year.”

Hermione hit his arm. “That’s not true, Ron.”

“You’re right. You two went back in time and watched it happen again, and don’t think I’m not jealous that I didn’t get to come along.”

“He was telling the truth,” Harry said.

“What?”

Hermione leaned toward Harry. “He’s innocent?”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “Yeah, he is.”

“How do you know?” Ron asked. “I’m not doubting you, Harry, but this is Malfoy we’re talking about. He’s as two-faced as they come.”

Harry made a face. “I don’t know how to put it. I just believe him. He looked like I felt every time I was telling the truth about something and everyone refused to believe me.”

Hermione tapped her nails against the side of her glass. “What are we going to do about it?”

“When did this become a ‘we’ thing?” Ron asked.

“Ronald,” Hermione said, exasperated.

“I’m not saying I won’t help! Just don’t volunteer me for these things.”

Hermione looked satisfied.

Harry winced. “Well, it’s not so much what we’re going to do, as what I’ve already done.” He looked at Hermione, trusting her reaction more than he did Ron’s. “I’ve paid his bail, and he’s staying here until the trial.”

“Here?” Ron demanded. “As in upstairs, right now?”

Harry nodded.

“Blimey,” Ron said. “I think I’d go mental.”

“He’s not been all that bad,” Harry said, although he wasn’t sure why he felt so defensive of Malfoy. “Not yet.”

Hermione finished her drink and set her glass down. “We’ll have to find who actually committed the crime, you realize. If he actually is innocent.”

“He is.”

“I’m not say he isn’t,” she said.

“Welling really isn’t going to like this,” Ron repeated. “Owsley either.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “I thought of that. I was hoping to keep it as quiet as I could.”

Ron snorted. “Good luck with that. You can probably keep them from finding out that he’s staying with you, which is mental, by the way, but once they find out you paid his bail they’re going to be so incredibly angry. Welling won’t let go of it for at least a year. Probably longer.”

“You should have talked to us first,” Hermione said.

“I know! I know,” Harry said, pushing his glasses up and dragging his hands across his face. “I’ve been telling myself that all day. But it’s done now.”

“Well, I don’t think you’ve made the wrong decision, at least.” Hermione sighed. “Although it was quite impulsive.”

“Will you help me, then?”

“I’m a little offended that you’re even asking,” Ron said. “It may be Malfoy, but if you’re actually convinced that he hasn’t done it that has to mean something.”

Harry laughed. “I spoke with his mother today. I think that now that I’m involved, she might actually kill me if I don’t keep him out of jail.”

“Isn’t she Andromeda’s sister?” Hermione asked.

“Yeah, and Bellatrix’s.”

“And Malfoy’s mother,” Ron put in. “Which, I think, counts the most.”

“Don’t say that,” Harry said. “She was civil. A little scary, but civil. I think she just doesn’t want to lose anymore of her family.”

Ron sipped at his whiskey. “Do you have the case file?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “In my bag, by the stove.”

Ron, who was sitting closest to the stove anyway, reached back and pulled the file out, along with some extra sheets of parchment. “Mind if I copy it to look through it?”

Harry shrugged. “Don’t let anyone else know you’ve done it, and it shouldn’t be a problem.”

Hermione frowned. “You really shouldn’t. It’s very illegal. Imagine if that got out. You’d both lose your jobs, heroes of the wizarding world or not.”

“Hermione Jean Granger,” Harry said, grinning. “You once broke into Gringotts, a feat only ever otherwise accomplished once. We escaped by flying out on a dragon.”

Hermione looked somewhere between embarrassed and proud. “That was different. Corruption in the DMLE is still a real problem.”

“Are you going to report me?” Ron asked.

“Well, no.”

“Then it’s fine.”

“Think of it this way,” Harry offered. “We’re doing it to keep an innocent man out of jail. We’re actually setting aside our personal biases for the sake of justice. It’s the opposite of corruption.”

Hermione eyed him skeptically. “You’ve gotten annoyingly good at talking your way out of problems.”

“I’ve had practice.”

“I’m done,” Ron said, rolling up the copied pages of the reports. “Do you want to go over it now?”

Harry shook his head. “No, you two can look at them at home, and we’ll talk about them later. I’ve had a long day. I just wanted to tell you this in person.”

Hermione stood up. “We still have some washing up to do.”

“Go,” Harry said. Hermione reached over and squeezed his hand.

“I’m proud of you for this.”

Hermione stepped into the green flames first, and headed off, but Ron hung back a moment. The house creaked, somewhere above them.

“Are you absolutely sure you believe him?” he asked.

Harry sighed. He put the glasses in the sink, to do in the morning if Kreacher didn’t get to them first. “Yeah, I really am. It’s the weirdest feeling, and I’m not even entirely sure why, but yeah. I really do believe that he didn’t do it.”

Ron clasped him on the shoulder. “All right, then. Just wanted to hear you say it one more time.” He smiled, nodded, and stepped away through the flames.

For a moment, Harry stood in the empty kitchen, bracing his hands against the table. He sighed.

Turning, he pushed open the kitchen door, to head up to his room, and nearly jumped out of his skin. A startled looking Draco Malfoy stood just outside. His cheeks were flushed, which was unfairly disarming. It made him look more alive, less like the waxen, marble statue he had resembled in the prison cell.

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop,” he said. “I just came down for some tea before bed.”

Harry regarded him for a long moment. He didn’t like the idea of Malfoy listening in on his conversations, but, as he had in everything over the past couple days, Malfoy seemed uncharacteristically genuine. As long as he was believing that Malfoy was innocent of murder, maybe he could try giving him the benefit of the doubt on the smaller things as well.

“Yeah, all right,” he said. “Good night, Malfoy.”

He pushed past and made his way up the stairs.


	3. Solo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun drinking game: take a shot every time Draco raises his eyebrows.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has read, commented, and subscribed!

“Potter!”

Harry winced, and turned around in his chair. It was four days since he’d posted Draco’s bail. He was surprised it had taken this long. “Good morning, Welling.”

Welling stood at her desk, her expression dangerous. “Why’ve you been meddling in my case?”

Harry briefly considered playing dumb; Welling looked downright murderous. “I’ve not done anything official,” he said, carefully. “Nothing to interfere with the investigation.”

“Nothing official, my left arse cheek! You posted his bail! He’s a murderer, Potter.”

“Keep your voice down,” Harry hissed, glancing about them. “It’s unprofessional.”

“No,” Welling said, lowering her voice all the same. “No, unprofessional is going behind my back to get my suspect out on bail. No one’s seen him since he was released. What if he flees the country? Just because you went to school with him—”

“He’s not going to flee the country,” Harry said. He felt a headache coming on, but he didn't think Welling would be inclined to give him any ibuprofen. “The ministry knows where he is. He’ll be there for the trial. And,” he added irritably, “this has nothing to do with my going to school with him, and far more to do with the fact that I don’t think he did it.”

“The thing is, Potter,” Welling said, jabbing a finger in his direction, “I don’t particularly care what you think. You’re not a judge. You don’t get to decide whether he’s guilty or not.”

Harry frowned. “Neither are you! I haven’t flown him over to France, or anything. I paid his bail, which is not only legal, but a right.”

“It’s not any of your business!”

“You don’t get to tell me what is and what isn’t my business!” Harry’s own voice was rising in volume now, and he struggled to control himself. He’d known Welling would be upset, and he didn't want to make any more of a scene than was happening already.

“For fuck’s sake,” Welling said. She crossed her arms. “Why do you even care?”

“Because I think you made a mistake,” Harry snapped, “which should concern you far more than Malfoy being out on bail.”

Welling snorted. “First of all, he did do this. End of story. He killed Albert Shrew, and I don’t know what he’s said to convince you, but I guarantee he’s lying. Second of all, in some weird alternate universe where you’re right and I’m wrong and Malfoy isn’t guilty of this? I don’t care. He’s not some innocent you have to protect. He has a Dark Mark. He’s a Death Eater. As far as I’m concerned, he should have been in Azkaban a long time ago.”

“Yes, you said that in the interrogation,” Harry sighed. “I understand, you think ex-Death Eaters don’t deserve a second chance, even if they were children at the time. Your feelings are clear, but your feelings aren’t the law.” In general, Harry liked Welling well enough. She was good at her job, and in the normal course of things she was a good person. Right now, he couldn’t stand her. She oozed self-righteous outrage, as if she had never made a mistake in her life.

Welling reddened. “Did you read the case file?”

“Yeah, I did,” Harry said. “And it looks to me like the only bit of evidence you have is his wand, which, given he reported it missing, is pretty weak, and the fact that Malfoy happens to live close by, which is even weaker.”

“You can’t just read my case!”

“I can and I did,” Harry said. “Welling, this conversation is over. If you’re not happy that I paid Malfoy’s bail, that’s your problem. It’s already done.” He turned back to his desk, determine to ignore her. He understood perfectly well where she was coming from, and he was more than a little embarrassed to think that his teenage self would likely have agreed with her. It was so much easier to see the world in either black or white, good guy or Death Eater, and ignore the fact that people change. It was even harder to imagine that people might not always be what you initially took them to be.

Welling stalked over to his desk and braced herself against it, not quite finished. He looked up at her, annoyed and unimpressed. “Stay out of my case,” she hissed.

He wasn’t sure if she thought she could intimidate him, or just hoped he’d listen to her because she asked; but in the company of such enemies as six years of Severus Snape’s teaching style, an ancient and fully-grown basilisk, and Voldemort himself, Monica Welling yelling at him in the office did not even begin to rank. “Get back to work.”

She stood for a moment longer, looking as if she wanted to stay something more, and then turned on her heel and stalked off toward the coffee pot at the other end of the office.

 

* * *

 

Owsley talked to Harry about it the next day. Harry got the impression that he had been holding off, trying to keep his patience with the whole thing, and hoping that Harry would come to him with an explanation for all of it. Harry, who was entirely sick of explaining his actions to everyone, had done no such thing.

Owsley approached more subtly than Welling. He caught Harry on his lunch break, at a small café a block away that catered specifically to ministry employees. Entering just after Harry sat down to eat, he slid into the seat across from Harry and put his elbows on the edge of the table. He used a paper napkin to wipe away a smear of something on the table. Without looking up, he said, “I know that Welling is upset about you interfering in the case, and I know that you don’t think that what you have done counts as interference, but you must see how this is a huge conflict of interest.”

“How so?” Harry asked around his sandwich.

“You’re a ministry official,” Owsley said, “and a very prominent public figure. Your opinion on the case sways the general opinion.”

“Good.” Harry swallowed. “The general opinion is, generally, wrong.”

“You’re not infallible either,” Owsley pointed out.

“No,” Harry agreed. “Few years ago, I probably would have agreed with the general opinion. I like to think I’ve grown as a person, though.”

“Come off it, Potter,” Owsley snorted. “If you’re so convinced that he’s innocent, why haven’t you asked to get put on the case? Investigate officially?”

“Can’t be bothered with the paperwork.”

Owsley looked profoundly unimpressed. “Don’t be flippant. You’re not a civilian anymore, and you’re not a student either.”

Harry made a sound of disbelief. He hadn’t really ever been a civilian. “Look, Owsley,” he said. “Bailing out Malfoy was perfectly legal. I’m not interfering with your investigation. What I do on my own time is my own business, and if it’s not then that’s an entirely separate problem.”

“I’m not careless when I decide to arrest people,” Owsley said. “I’ve been doing this far longer than you have. I know what a guilty person looks like.”

Harry clenched his hand around his fork. He hated this part of the Aurors. Not all, but most of the older Aurors had it: the overconfidence, the bravado, as if they had all the answers in the world. There had been enough purges of the department to weed out the corruption, and so many of the Aurors who had been part of the Order had moved to higher positions in the government, that those left had an inflated view of themselves. They smiled down condescendingly on the new Aurors, fresh from the war, and commented about their lack of experience, their willingness to run headfirst into situations without looking, and then turned around and arrested people along the lines of their own prejudices. Sometimes he worried that they were just repeating the aftermath of the first war, the type of thing that had led to Sirius spending twelve years in Azkaban without a trial.

“You know what a guilty person looks like,” Harry said, tightly, “but I know what an innocent one looks like.”

Owsley laughed. “All right then, Potter. Good luck with your ideas.” He stood. “And be careful. Watch that you don’t end up doing more harm to Mr Malfoy than good.” He rapped his knuckles on the table, and sauntered off.

Harry glared at him as he left.

 

* * *

 

Living with Malfoy was going, if not well, then at least not badly. Malfoy was quiet, and kept to himself, which Harry appreciated. There had been no subtle barbs or even complaints. Kreacher, on the second day, had noticed a wet cough that Malfoy had been endeavoring to hide by sequestering himself in his room. Muttering the entire time, he had concocted what he referred to as the Black family secret cure to coughs and colds of all kinds. Personally, Harry thought it looked and smelled like poison, and brought home several vials of Pepper-Up potion, which he left in the drawing room for Malfoy to discover.

Most of the time, Harry and Malfoy mostly avoided each other, except in the evenings when Malfoy asked if Harry had made any progress toward finding out who the real killer was, and Harry was forced to admit that he hadn’t actually gotten a chance to look into it yet.

Following his conversations with Welling and Owsley, Harry had been suddenly and unexpectedly inundated with three new cases. There was a witch who had shown up in Brighton after three months missing, with no memory of what had transpired. Foul play was suspected, and Harry spent the better part of a week conducting interviews and checking on her in St. Mungos while she recovered. There were no significant leads, but she was from a prominent family that owled daily demanding answers.

Over the weekend, he'd gotten pulled in to advise on a hostage situation that occurred in Manchester. He spent hours talking to the hostage takers, but in the end he had to burst in, wand blazing, with several other Aurors. All the hostages were freed, and the muggles were appropriately Obliviated, but the hostage takers were both killed by a rebounding curse.He took a sleeping draught for the next few nights to stave off the nightmares.

Meanwhile, new evidence had surfaced on a long-cold case regarding the murder of a pair of Muggleborn wizards during their war. Harry briefed their son, a man named Oscar Cartwright, who’d come down to the ministry from Scotland, on the developments. Cartwright, only a few years older than Harry himself, took the news badly, strongly implying that the Ministry was doing less than it’s best toward finding his parents’ killer. He looked worse for wear, like most of the orphans of the war. There was a slowly healing scar from a bar fight a month ago beneath his left eye. “Bugger enchanted the glass,” he said when Harry asked about it. “Then it just got infected."

When he finished with Cartwright toward mid-morning, Harry made a beeline to the lift, and went down to talk to Hermione in the Department for Magical Creatures. Unlike himself and Ron, Hermione had her own office and a door that closed. While people would eventually think to look for him there, they would look several other places first, which gave him a brief reprieve.

Harry closed Hermione’s door and sighed with relief. “I think Welling and Owsley are trying to make my life hell,” he said. "First the witch in Brighton, then the hostages, and now Cartwright."

Hermione looked at him from over a bit of paperwork. “They’re trying to keep you off the Malfoy case.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured.” Harry pushed a hand through his hair. “I hate this. They should want to know if they’re wrong.”

“Did you ever want some telling you that you were wrong about Malfoy?” Hermione asked, pointedly.

“I usually was,” Harry pointed out. “Anyway, if I can’t actually look into the case at all, I’ll have just made them hate me for nothing. And Narcissa Malfoy might try to murder me, which, while I don’t think she’d succeed, I would prefer to avoid.”

Hermione looked concerned. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten involved with this in the first place, Harry. I mean, it is Malfoy.”

“You know I’m right on this,” Harry said. He hoped Hermione knew he was right on this. He had counted on Hermione’s support.

“I do,” Hermione said, “but the system is so much less corrupt, these days. It’s not perfect, but if he’s innocent he shouldn’t be convicted.”

“He ‘shouldn’t’ be doesn’t mean he won’t be.” Harry paced the length of her office. “The fact that they’re trying so hard to keep me off this says that there’s something, doesn’t it? It says that there’s something they know isn’t quite right.”

“It might mean that they don’t want Harry Potter interfering. You know how Aurors get; they’re possessive over these things.”

Harry shook his head. “I hate this. I hate not knowing. I hate people being possessive over these things. I hate having to piece things together from the barest bits of evidence and just hope I get it right. It used to be so simple, you know? Draco Malfoy was guilty, and Death Eaters were bad, and Voldemort was probably behind it all.”

Hermione smiled faintly. “Harry, don't tell me you're getting nostalgic for our days fighting Voldemort.”

Harry stopped where he’d been pacing, and then barked a laugh. “I suppose.” At least then there was an end to it all, something to work towards. He leaned against the wall, and let his head fall back. “I want to do the right thing, Hermione. Why does that feel so hard these days?”

Hermione’s eye glinted with something that looked suspiciously like mischief. “Why don’t we meet at yours tonight? We can all sit down and look into it together.”

"Are you suggesting homework?"

Hermione threw a quill at him. "Shut up."

Harry bit his lip. “Yeah, okay. I’ll let Malfoy know when I get home.”

“How’s he doing?”

Harry shrugged. “A bit bored, I suppose.”

Hermione hesitated. “You should be careful. Even if he is innocent, he’s still Malfoy, and living in your house.”

Harry nodded.

 

* * *

 

The first several days staying with Potter, Draco slept as much as he could. The cough he’d picked up in Azkaban lingered, and, against the manners his mother had ingrained in him over the years, he allowed himself to burrow beneath the thick duvet on the bed until the warmth had seeped back into the bones. Kreacher brewed a cold remedy that Draco recognized from his childhood, when his mother would bring him a salty potion and stroke his hair while he drank it all. It worked, in the end, but it tasted awful. Potter, evidently taking pity on him, wordlessly bought several vials of Pepper-Up potion, which Draco took gratefully.

On the fifth day, the day after Potter came home complaining that Welling had finally found out that he had paid Draco's bail, he finally felt well enough to explore the house thoroughly. Potter had, not warned him, exactly, but asked him not to leave the house, which itched at him, like he had exchanged one prison for another. He prowled the house nervously.

He remembered the basic layout from his early childhood, so he began with the places he'd never been permitted to go. When Walburga Black had been alive, everyone had behaved as if the uppermost floor of the house did not exist. Once he'd asked his mother what was up at the top of his stairs, and she had warned him to never speak of it. Now, with more or less free reign of the house, Draco waited until Kreacher was busy elsewhere and stole up the stairs. The landing was small and a bit cramped, with two doors leading off of it in either direction. He inspected them curiously.

The first door had a plaque on it that read, neatly, SIRIUS, in engraved letters. He pushed the door open cautiously, half expecting Potter to appear back at home, or worse Walburga Black to rise from the grave, and yell at him for snooping.

Nothing happened.

In sharp contrast to the rest of the house, which felt lived in and friendly, an air of disuse hung about this room, faded Gryffindor banners and ripped posters of muggle women lining the walls. Someone had cleaned it recently, but no one lived there.

Only one wizarding photograph hung up on the wall, and even at a distance, Draco recognized a young Sirius Black, a young Remus Lupin, and two other boys. The one in the center, an Indian boy who bore a striking resemblance to Harry, must have been James Potter. The last boy beamed, watery-eyed, at the camera, and with a jolt, Draco recognized Peter Pettrigrew. He shuddered.

Pettigrew had slunk around the manor for almost a year, prying and watching and feigning deference. None of them had liked him—most of them had muttered that he was a coward and a rat. But, the Dark Lord had referenced some great service he rendered. He must have been the one to betray the Potters, then. No wonder he was favoured. No wonder he had always felt like a spineless and wheedling man. If pressed, Draco could picture his own friends abandoning him, should it be in their interests. But, he could not imagine them ever betraying him in such a way, nor would he ever betray them. Whatever other faults they might have, Slytherins valued loyalty.

Other than the one photograph and the general feeling of abandonment, if Draco had ever taken the time to imagine what the Gryffindor dorm rooms must look like, this would be what he pictured. He shut the door uneasily, feeling unwelcome even looking in.

The next bedroom over was very different, but no more welcoming. A hand-lettered sign forbade entry, expect by the express permission of Regulus Black. Draco grimaced, thinking of a similar sign that hung on his own door at home. As if in deliberate defiance of its neighbor, this room's walls were draped with green and silver. The duvet, and the window curtains, although faded, were also Slytherin colours. Above the bed, and below where someone had painted the Black family crest, Regulus had apparently stuck up a collage of yellowed newspaper clippings. Draco stepped over to read one. It was from the mid-seventies, when the Dark Lord was first coming to power. Someone had underlined all the mentions of the Dark Lord and marked them with small exclamation points. Draco turned away, suddenly uneasy.

His eye fell on a photograph, the figures in it waving excitedly. Regulus Black stood in the front row of the Slytherin Quidditch team, grinning. He had the same nose as Draco. He had played seeker, too.

It seemed Potter maintained the bedrooms of the two Black brothers. The rest of the Black family had been almost entirely purged from the house, but here they lived on. Sirius Black's room he understood—after all, the man had been Harry's godfather—but there must have been something he was missing with Regulus. He knew Regulus had defected from the Dark Lord, in the end. Walburga, when very drunk, had spoken of him once, calling him a coward and a blood traitor, before dissolving into great, heaving sobs over a bottle of port. He wondered if he might have liked Regulus, or if he were anything like him. But then, he'd never actually had the courage to defect, had he?

He stood in the room a moment longer, hoping for—he didn't know what he was hoping for. Some sort of sign, or something that might show him who Regulus Black had been. But there was nothing but an empty room, and he left quietly, pulling the door closed behind him.

He poked around a bit more, just as something to do. On the same floor as the bedroom Potter had assigned to him were four other bedrooms. Draco was sure that in a muggle house, they would not have been able to fit quite so many rooms into one floor; the total area of the rooms seemed suspiciously more than what the building permitted. One of the rooms must have been Potter's, and Draco didn't linger there. He felt too much of an intruder already. Two of the others were made up but unlived in, apparently just in use as guest rooms. The final room was locked. Draco was fairly certain it was the master bedroom, but without his wand he could not undo the lock to check. He thought he caught the faint scent of hippogriff droppings, though, and decided he didn't want to know.

In the end, he settled in the drawing room. A couple of bookshelves had been pushed in front of the Black family tree, but sticking out to one side he could see the tail end of his own name. He grimaced.

An upright piano stood against the wall across from the windows. The lid was closed. It looked as if it had gone many years unused. Curious, Draco pulled out the bench and lifted up the seat. Several books of sheet music were tucked neatly inside, all yellowed with age. He pulled out the top one and flipped through it, looking for a piece he recognized. He settled on a Beethoven sonata. Sitting down, he leaned the sheet music against the stand and opened the piano.

It had been years since he had played the piano. At the manor during the occupation, some of the Death Eaters had got it into their heads to practice hexes at it, and had destroyed most of the keys. Muggle ivory was expensive and problematic to replace, let alone the dragon ivory that the keys had been made of, and Draco hadn't gotten around to it yet. On top of that, he was pretty sure something inside the piano had been damaged, although he wasn't sure what. He'd tried to play it once, and it had made a noise like a dying animal.

When he was a child, his mother had insisted on lessons, twice a week. It had been one of the few decisions his mother made with absolutely no input from his father. She had taught him herself for the first several years, until Draco was eight and deemed old enough for a proper tutor. He'd never been particularly naturally talented, but he'd liked it and worked hard at it. He liked the way his hands stretched over the keys and his fingers moved, and the way you could see the tendons sliding and flexing beneath the skin. When he knew a piece, properly knew a piece, he could play without thinking, without reading the music, letting his fingers do all the work, and just listen to the music.

His father complained about it. To his mind, Draco had never been good at it, and he had hated the way Draco would sit at the piano and practice the same piece over and over again. He had complained that he couldn't concentrate when Draco practised, and that it had been a waste of money to pay the tutor. But Narcissa had always liked it when Draco played. The summer after his fourth year, when the Dark Lord had reemerged and his mother and father had fought almost constantly, he had learned all her favourite pieces and played them again and again for her.

He settled his fingers on the keys. The ivory was cool to the touch.

He started to run through some chromatic scales, but stopped abruptly, wincing. He played a few octaves and frowned. Several of the keys were sticking, the high B flat made a noise like something had been caught between the strings and the hammer, and the entire thing was horribly out of tune.

"Kreacher!" he called out. He heard the sound of a pot being put down in the kitchen, and a moment later the house elf appeared.

"Yes, Master Draco?"

"When was the last time someone played this piano?"

Kreacher scowled and tugged at his ear hair. "Not since Mistress Walburga was alive," he said. "There is no music in the house like there used to be."

Draco snorted, picturing Walburga Black, dressed in heavy robes, bottle of port on top of the piano, playing something dour and horrific.

"Would Master Draco like Kreacher to tune it?" Kreacher asked, hopefully.

He sighed. It was rude to ask someone else's house elf to do something, and the fact that Potter probably wouldn't mind wasn't a good enough excuse. "No, thank you, Kreacher."

Kreacher deflated a bit and went back to the kitchen, promising lunch in an hour, and reminding Draco to take the potion for his cough. Draco closed the piano back up. Carefully, he put everything as he had found it, reluctant for Potter to find out that he had been touching things. He pulled a book with a vaguely interesting title off the shelf and flopped down on the sofa to pass the time.

Nevertheless, over the next couple days, he kept coming back to the piano. On Thursday, he sat on the floor next to it and paged through all the sheet music, making mental note of the pieces he could play and the pieces he had always wanted to play. On Friday, he tried to play again, having convinced himself that the piano surely couldn't have been as bad as he remembered. Upon sitting down, he discovered that some of the notes in the lower octaves barely made noise at all, and decided that the piano was in fact in worse shape than he had thought it was in.

All Friday evening, he debated asking Potter to have Kreacher tune the piano, but Potter was distracted by a case file he had brought home from work and didn't seem to even notice Draco. Saturday, he decided to ask not only about the piano, but also about the progress on his own case, but first Potter slept most of the day, and, once he woke up, he shouted out that he had to do some shopping and didn't come back until after Draco had already gone to bed.

On Sunday, Potter received a Patronus from Weasley when he came down the stairs in the morning. Draco, from the next room over, heard the little silver dog rapidly telling Potter about a hostage situation in Manchester. The hostage takers had taken over a muggle building and had threatened to start killing people unless they could speak to Potter himself. He rushed out a moment later. When he returned that evening, his face was drawn and his eyes dark. He practically ran through the front hallway and into the kitchen, where Draco heard him calling for Kreacher to bring him the muggle whiskey. Draco retreated to his room and said nothing about any of it.

By Monday, he decided he would need to take matters into his own hands. He was going stir crazy in the house, with nothing to do, and not even his wand to play with. He'd sent out owls to Pansy and Greg but, because of the Fidelius charm, hadn't been able to ask them to come see him. Besides, he didn't think Potter would thank him for inviting the Slytherin horde to descend upon his home.

He buttoned up the coat that his mother had brought for him, and counted out a bit of muggle currency that he kept in his pocket for emergencies. He had about three hundred pounds in flimsy muggle banknotes that he did not particularly trust. The goblins at Gringotts had assured him it was worth about sixty Galleons and would see him through most emergencies in the muggle world. He hoped it would be enough to get what he needed.

He opened the front door cautiously, wondering if Kreacher would try to stop him. But the old house-elf was busy in the kitchen, and nothing happened. He slipped outside, closed the door behind him, and walked off, trying to look as if he knew what he was doing.

A block away from Grimmauld Place, it occurred to him that he was in the middle of a heavily residential area, and that if he didn't want to spend the rest of the day just walking aimlessly, he would have to brave the odd muggle concept of a taxi. He didn't quite understand how muggles could casually get into a car driven by a stranger without fearing for their lives. He didn't understand how muggles could casually get into a car at all, for that matter. He loitered on the side of the road, feeling both stupid and incredibly cold. Not for the first time, he wished for his wand back.

After a good ten minutes, in which he strongly contemplated returning to the house, he spotted a taxi hurtling his way. He stuck his hand into the street, in the same way that he'd seen muggles do in the past. The taxi slowed to a stop, and Draco climbed awkwardly in.

"Where to?" the driver asked, after a moment of silence.

Draco could have beat himself over the head. He had forgotten that muggle transportation wouldn't just know where you needed to go. "I need to get to a shop that sells musical instruments," he said, slowly. "Is there some place nearby?"

The driver peered at him in the mirror, looking unimpressed. Eventually, he shrugged. "There's a place about a few miles away that sells pianos."

"Yes," Draco said, a bit too enthusiastically. "That would be perfect."

The driver laughed under his breath. "Yeah, all right, mate."

The car began to move, and Draco grabbed onto the handle of the door. "Merlin and Morgana both, this is how I die," he muttered to himself.

It was a short drive, made longer by London traffic, and the fact that the driver took what Draco was sure was a more circuitous route than necessary. The car moved far more unevenly than a broom would, bouncing along with every variation in the road. The back of the taxi smelled vaguely of something sour and unpleasant. When they pulled up in front of the store, Draco paid the driver carefully, accepted his change, and got out, trying not think about how he would get back to Grimmauld Place after he bought what he needed. He wasn't sure he had it in him to get back into a taxi. At least he had a precise address to give then.

He walked into the shop. A little bell above the door jangled.

The shop was only the one room, lit by the false fluorescent light that muggles preferred, and filled with at least a hundred different pianos. His eye was drawn immediately to a dark red parlor grand that gleamed in the center, and which reminded him strongly of the piano he had grown up with. The nostalgia struck him strongly and unexpectedly. It wasn't fair that a piano like that should be sitting in the middle of a muggle shop, while his mother's piano sat, wrecked, at home. He forced himself to look away from it. Silently, he vowed to himself that when all else had been taken care of, he would find the time and the money repair his piano.

Along the far wall, several flat keyboards were displayed, and Draco wondered what they were for. There was no way that muggles would be able to fit the insides of a piano within the plastic casing, without access to expanding charms. Many of them had additional buttons along the top, like an organ, perhaps. Some of them didn't even have the full eighty-eight keys.

He scanned the shop for an employee.

Near the back, a young woman with bright green hair lounged, pushing buttons on a small metal rectangle in her hand. She hadn't so much as stirred when he entered. Draco straightened his spine, did his best imitation of his mother's face whenever they'd gone shopping for his school supplies, and cleared his throat. The woman looked up.

She walked over, shoving the metal rectangle into her pocket. "Can I help you, sir?"

"I need things to tune a piano," he said.

She frowned. "You should really call a professional for that."

"I'm afraid that's not an option," he said, although suddenly he had to push down the fear of somehow badly damaging Potter's piano. Judging from the state of it, Potter wouldn't notice anyway. "Do you have any of the equipment I would need for that?"

She inclined her head to the left side of the store. "Everything you should need'll be over there. There's a couple books too. The one with the red cover is probably the best, but the blue is cheaper."

Draco thanked her and walked over the wall. He was briefly overwhelmed by the options available to him. Most of the tools he didn't recognize, and he had no idea how he would go about using any of them on a piano. His eye fell on a neat stack of the red books she had mentioned. At least that was somewhere to begin. He picked it up gingerly.

Calling it a book was frankly generous: it couldn't have been more than fifty pages, written in dry, technical language. There were several diagrams throughout it, pointing out and labeling different parts of the piano. He flipped through it. It seemed that it did in fact include instructions on how to tune a piano, and how to keep it in tune once it had been. He studied it for a while, and carefully selected one of each of the tools the book recommended he buy. For good measure, he got some of the tools the book suggested for repairs, as well. He wasn't sure he would have enough money for another taxi ride to the shop. He brought it all up to the counter, and the young woman rung him up while eyeing him critically.

"Good luck," she said at the end, after he handed her most of his remaining muggle money.

"Thanks," he said, and left.

He was able to catch another taxi home quickly enough, although once more he was sure that the driver took him on a longer route than necessary. He gave the driver the last of his money, and hurried inside. Kreacher was waiting for him with lunch in the kitchen. The house elf glared at the plastic of the muggle bags, and refused to touch them. He claimed that muggle plastic made him sick.

Draco hid the tools under the bed in his room, but took the book down to the drawing room with him. He spent the rest of the day paging through it, studying what he would have to do, and making notes in the margins.

The next day, after Potter left, Draco opened up the piano and looked inside critically. He weighed the piano tuning wrench in his hand, and turned on the plastic rectangle that would supposedly tell him when the note was on key. Worst case scenario, he supposed, he could get Kreacher to fix it.

Over the next several hours, he worked at the piano, adjusting things as slowly as possible. A couple of the piano wires had to be replaced entirely, and he was very glad he had thought to buy the supplies for that too. There was in fact something between the hammer and the string of the high B flat; somehow a moth had worked its way into the piano, and then died, its corpse caught in the wires. He removed it distastefully.

Kreacher peered in disapprovingly now and again. In the early afternoon, he brought Draco a sandwich for lunch and repeated his offer to fix the piano magically. Draco, enjoying himself thoroughly, declined.

By the late afternoon, Draco finished, and closed the piano back up carefully. He touched the keys and played a couple of scales. He'd managed not to break anything, at least. Jarringly for a piano found in the Black house, the piano was a cheerful sounding instrument. He wondered if there had ever been an enchantment on it back in Walburga Black's day. No doubt it had once played dirges clunkily to itself. Any remnants of that, however, had long worn off.

Potter came home not long after Draco finished putting the tools away. Draco asked about the case, but Potter just looked dark. "They don't want me looking into it," he said.

Draco wanted to say something more—he had a comment ready about how what the ministry wanted had never particularly stopped Potter before—but Potter had already walked off into the kitchen. Draco didn't see him again before he left the next morning.

The shine of triumph at having successfully tuned the piano had worn off by the time Draco finished breakfast. He had brooded all night on Potter's dismissal of him the night before. He felt like Potter wasn't even particularly trying to look into the case, in which case what had been the point of posting Draco's bail? Perhaps Narcissa was right, and Draco ought to go home. Perhaps he ought to live up to everyone's expectations and flee to the continent. He paced the house moodily all morning, caught in these thoughts, before finally sitting down at the piano just after lunch.

He pulled out the Beethoven again. He'd always liked the idea of Beethoven, gone deaf but still hammering away at the piano, producing music by memory alone. There was something suitably tragic about it, and Beethoven's music always tended toward the dark and somber. He began playing warm-ups, running across the piano in chromatic scales. His fingers were stiff and had forgotten a lot of the movements, but he forced himself to be patient. If he closed his eyes and didn't let himself think about it, his hands knew what to do without his having to tell them anything. It grew easier as he went along, his fingers and wrists loosening, until he ran from one end of the piano to the other evenly, without missing a note.

Eventually, satisfied that he was warmed up, he searched for something he recognized and remembered in the Beethoven.

He began with shorter pieces;  _Für Elise_ , which came back to him properly after his third time playing through while squinting at the sheet music, and a G major bagatelle from near the end of Beethoven's life. He hadn't tuned the piano perfectly, after all. He could hear some of the notes hitting a bit flat or a bit sharp, but the stuck keys were loosening as he played, and overall he thought he'd done fairly well. His mother would no doubt have been horrified, but he liked the little bit of imperfection.

He leaned his elbow against the piano and flipped through the music again. There was one sonata that had always given him trouble, one of Beethoven's last. His mother liked it, especially the third movement. He had been working on it the summer after his fifth year, before he had decided to get his Dark Mark, and found himself sucked into a world he wasn't prepared for. He'd almost perfected it, but he never finished, distracted by everything. After so many years, playing it required mostly sight reading, and he carefully played each hand by itself several times, counting the beats out loud, before trying to put them together.

It felt good, to know that he had done something, even if it was just tune Harry Potter's piano, and that he was making something, even if it was just poorly played piano music that only he and an old house elf heard.

 

* * *

 

Harry came home exhausted. He'd been found out in Hermione's office, and her supervisor had forced him to return to his own floor. Once there, he'd had to file all the relevant paperwork on the Cartwright case, while Welling prepared notes for Malfoy's trial at the next desk, glaring at him the whole time. He'd eventually managed to tell Ron to come over with Hermione that night by throwing a note across to his desk, like they were in school again and trying to avoid the professor's attention. Ron flashed a thumbs up, and then went back to his own work.

By the end of the day, when he Apparated back home, he was both looking forward to and dreading the upcoming meeting in the kitchen. He knew no more about the case now than he had when he first went to Azkaban to visit Malfoy, and his own uselessness frustrated him. He hoped Ron had more insight. If he did, he hadn't mentioned it during the day.

Harry pushed open the front door, walked inside and stopped. Someone was playing the piano. He hadn't even known that the piano could play anymore. He'd never really bothered to touch it, except to set things on top of it sometimes. It wasn't as if the Dursleys had ever paid for him to have piano lessons.

He crept up the stairs, trying to not disturb the music.

In the drawing room, Malfoy sat at the piano. He was smiling faintly, the corners of his lips just turned slightly up with satisfaction. In any other context, Harry might have thought he looked smug, but that suddenly seemed wholly unfair. Harry didn’t think Malfoy even realized he was smiling. His whole body moved as he played, leaning into the phrasing of the music, his head nodding on the accented notes. He'd rolled up his sleeves to keep them away from his hands. It left the faded, pink scar of the Dark Mark uncovered. If he had noticed Harry come into the room, he gave no sign of it. He kept glancing between the music and his hands, as if slightly baffled that his hands were able to keep up with the notes written on the page. He looked young and happy, both of which sat well on him. He spent too much time frowning and looking serious, Harry thought unexpectedly. When he was happy, there was an impish, pleased air about him.

Malfoy got caught on a phrase, his fingers tangling over a run of sixteenth notes, and he stopped, cursing. The smile vanished.

"I didn't know you played the piano," Harry commented.

Malfoy jumped up and spun to face Harry, startled. When he saw it was Harry, he relaxed, but his cheeks flushed faintly pink. He rolled down his left sleeve hurriedly and clapped his right hand over his forearm. "Merlin's beard, I didn't know you were there."

Harry shrugged. "I just came in. I didn't know this piano played."

Malfoy looked vaguely embarrassed. "It didn't. I tuned it."

"Oh." Harry stopped. He felt as if he ought to say something more, but he couldn't think what. He kept looking at Malfoy. The top button of his shirt had come unbuttoned. He swallowed. "What were you playing?"

"Beethoven," Malfoy said. "One of the sonatas."

Harry grinned. "I didn't think purebloods would know Beethoven."

Malfoy rolled his eyes, exasperated. Just like that, he snapped back into focus, as condescending and arrogant as ever. "Of course we know Beethoven, Potter. I'm surprised you know about him, frankly."

"He was a muggle," Harry pointed out.

"Don't be ridiculous," Malfoy snapped. "He was a pureblood wizard. One of the old German families."

"No, he was not," Harry protested. "No way."

"He absolutely was. The Beethovens heirs still go to Durmstrang. Are you telling me muggles know about Beethoven?"

"Do muggles know about Beethoven? Malfoy, do you even hear yourself sometimes?" Harry laughed and shook his head at Malfoy's affronted look. "I bet wizarding music is just so terrible that purebloods have been forced to call muggle composers wizards."

"Next you'll be telling me that Wagner was a muggle too," Malfoy scoffed.

"He was!"

"As if muggles could produce music like that."

Harry scowled. "You know, Malfoy, the whole pureblood supremacy thing is a little passé by now."

Malfoy flushed. He didn't have the good grace to look embarrassed at the misstep, but at least he looked faintly annoyed, although whether at himself or at Harry for calling him out, Harry couldn't be sure. "I didn't mean that."

"Give it fifty years," Harry warned, softening, "and I guarantee purebloods will be claiming Freddie Mercury was a wizard."

"Who?"

Harry shook his head. "You'll find out one day, and it will blow your entire mind." He sighed and dropped down onto the sofa. "Hermione and Ron are coming in a bit."

Malfoy's expression turned bitter. "Would you prefer if I take dinner in my room, then?"

Harry looked up at him, startled. "No, I mean they're coming to look over your case."

The faint flush rose up in Malfoy's cheeks again. "Oh," he said. "You want me there then?"

"Well, yeah," Harry grinned. "We don't have access to much of the evidence—although I did manage to look at it before Welling and Owsley got all annoyed with me, so there's that. I assumed you would want to be present."

"Yes," Malfoy said. "Yes, of course."

 

* * *

 

Weasley and Granger showed up in a flurry of Floo powder a little while later. Kreacher, upon hearing that there were guests for dinner, had complained loudly and at length about never getting any proper warning about these things, although Draco thought he seemed rather pleased at the chance to cook for more people. He even caught Kreacher referring to Granger as "the nice muggleborn witch," which was both unexpected and highly amusing.

"Walburga Black would have gone into conniptions if she saw what you had done to her house-elf," Draco commented quietly to Potter.

"She has," Potter groaned. "Her portrait caught Kreacher asking Hermione what sort of pudding she preferred for her birthday once and nearly shouted the entire house down. I thought she'd never shut up. I had to threaten to actually hex the portrait."

Neither Granger or Weasley seemed surprised to see Draco sitting with Potter at the table. Granger was friendly, and even Weasley managed to be civil. Draco did his best to return the favor. The last thing he wanted was to appear ungrateful just now. He tried not to let it show just how strange it felt to be in the small room with all of them together.

Everyone settled at the table, and Weasley pulled out the file. "I'm so glad Welling doesn't know I'm looking into this too," he said. "She's been trying all week to get me to agree with her that you shouldn't be looking into it."

Potter groaned and rubbed a hand over his face. "She's a good Auror, but she's driving me mad."

"You and me both, mate."

"So." Granger clapped her hands together and looked between the rest of them. "Where do you think we should begin?"

"Well," Potter said, "I guess the first question is whether Malfoy was deliberately framed?"

"They did use my wand," Draco pointed out.

"So, then, probably."

"The same person that stole Malfoy's wand was likely the one to kill Shrew, then," Weasley said, as if that weren't perfectly obvious already. "You said your wand was stolen a week before Shrew was murdered, right?"

"The same day that I got into an argument with Shrew," Draco confirmed.

"Interesting, that." Weasley looked thoughtful. "Did you fight with him before or after your wand went missing?"

Draco tried to remember. He knew he'd had his wand when he got to the village, because he'd charmed the mud from the walk down off his shoes. After that, he had tucked his wand up his sleeve like usual, and hadn't noticed it missing until he got back to the manor. There had been a number of times that he had been jostled by people in the street, both before and after he talked to Shrew, when someone with very light fingers might have been able to steal his wand. He shook his head. "I don't know. Why does it matter?"

"It might not," Potter said, shrugging. "The question is just, did whoever did this plan to kill someone when they took your wand? Did they take your wand for some other reason, and then see you argue with Shrew? Or did they see you argue with Shrew and then decide to take your wand? What were their original intentions?"

"And why did they wait so long to act?" Weasley added. "So, next question," he said, tipping his chair back onto two legs. "Who would want to frame Draco Malfoy for murder?"

"Try half of wizarding Britain," said Draco, dryly.

Weasley snorted. "Doesn't exactly narrow it down, does it?"

"What if," Granger said, looking up suddenly. "What if this isn't the first time this has happened?"

Draco raised his eyebrows. "Other people framed for murder? Yes, I do think that has happened before."

"That's not what I mean, and you know it. What if this same person has been framing other people already?"

"What, like, other former Death Eaters?" Weasley asked.

"We'd have to look at arrest records," Potter said slowly, "but that's not impossible."

"It might not be for murder," Granger persisted. "There's all sorts of other things that can get you arrested if you've got a record."

"Yeah," Draco said. Everyone turned to him, but he continued, uncomfortably. "It's not wrong, necessarily, but they take a much harsher eye to you if you've a Dark Mark. Normal people caught tampering with muggle objects, for example, it's a fine, maybe a year in Azkaban if they've done something really nasty and managed to hurt someone. For someone like me, though, that'll get you ten years, at least. All of us have noticed it. Everyone's careful these days." He shifted in his seat.

"Must be real hard, mate," Weasley said sarcastically.

"I'm not saying it is," Draco said, keeping his voice carefully even. "But if you're thinking there might be others that have been framed, it's relevant to know."

"Malfoy's right," Granger said. Weasley looked at her with something akin to shock and horror. "He is!"

"All right," Potter said, as if that decided everything. "We'll have to dodge Welling and Owsley, but we can look into that."

"And what is it that I'm supposed to do?" Draco asked. "Sit around in here, twiddling my thumbs?"

"Oi, you could still be in Azkaban," Weasley said.

"For now, yes," Potter said at the same time. "I know it's a bit boring, but it's best if you don't go out."

Draco pressed his lips together, but said nothing. Apparently Kreacher hadn't mentioned his little excursion then, and Potter hadn't put it together himself. Let Potter think Draco was staying indoors all day. He would be safe enough in muggle London.

"There's one more thing," Potter said. He glanced at Granger and Weasley, and then back at Draco. "It's a bit invasive, but it might help."

"Spit it out," Draco prompted.

"We might be able to spot who stole your wand, even if you didn't at the time, if we could have your memory of that day."

Draco folded his arms over his chest. Potter was right. It was very invasive, and it most cases very rude to ask for a memory. He knew, of course, that memories were a typical investigative technique of the Aurors, but long animosity with Potter rankled at the idea of letting him into his head like that. "I offered the memory to the Aurors when I reported my wand stolen," he said, by way of answer. "They said it wasn't necessary."

"We're not looking for the wand, though," Potter said. "We're looking for the person who took it."

He closed his eyes and sighed. It was worth it, if it helped them find something. "I'll need to borrow someone's wand, then."

Potter's expression changed, like he had just remembered something important. He looked suddenly uncomfortable and a bit sheepish. "Er," he said, "I can do one better than that, actually. Give me a moment." He stood up and hurried up the stairs, Draco's eyes following him out.

Draco looked questioningly at Granger and Weasley, who both shook their heads. Neither of them knew what he was after either. A moment passed in tense silence. They could hear Potter's footsteps moving around above them.

"I've got it!" he called, and thundered back down the stairs. Draco looked over. In Potter's hand was a wand, ten inches long, hawthorne, unyielding. He sucked in a breath. He hadn't thought to see that again.

"I didn't think you still had it." His voice came out oddly strangled, even to his own ears.

"Yeah, er." Potter grimaced. "I meant to return it to you. There were a lot of requests to put it in museums and stuff, but I kept telling myself I needed to give it back. I guess I never got around to it."

"It's not like we haven't seen each other," Draco said, bitingly. This was the wand that had chosen him, eleven years old and sure of everything in the world. It had seen him through his darkest times. He'd looked into it since then, obsessed over it a bit, since Potter had won it from him. Hawthorne, for a conflicted nature. Terrible, how Ollivander, with his pale, empty eyes, had known what Draco was before he himself ever had.

"I forgot," Potter said, with that damnable honesty that made it so difficult to get properly angry with him. "I probably shouldn't give it to you now. God knows, Welling might have an actual aneurysm if she knew. But it is yours." He held the wand out.

Draco accepted it with a shaking hand. "It might not work, you know," he said. "Since you won it from me."

"You could punch me in the face and take it," Potter offered.

Draco smiled tentatively. “Tempting as that is, I think I'll pass, thanks." The wand let off a small shower of sparks in his hand. It felt like coming home.

"Think it missed you." Potter smiled. Draco couldn't stop himself from smiling back, just for a moment.

He held the wand up to his temple and thought of the day he fought with Shrew. He thought back through the walk down to town, and then the paths he had taken and the people had seen. He moved the wand away from his head, and a thin, silvery strand of memory flowed out, clinging to its tip. Weasley passed him an empty phial. He dropped it in, and handed it over to Potter.

"There," he said. "Find whoever did this."


	4. Andante

Harry managed to sneak away from his desk toward the middle of the day, with Malfoy’s memory tucked into his pocket. Ron nodded at him as he passed.

He crept into the evidence room, feeling for all the world like he was a teenager again, sneaking around places he shouldn’t have been in Hogwarts. The Pensieve stood at the far end of the evidence room, quiet and empty. He pulled the phial out of his pocket and regarded the memory, floating and twisting within it. For all the memories he’d looked into over the years, in Dumbledore’s office and then after, and all the things he’d seen that he was never meant to see, it felt different to be looking into Malfoy’s head. After all the school years Malfoy had spent trying to keep Harry out of his business, now he would look through Malfoy’s eyes, see what Malfoy saw, even if it were just an otherwise innocuous afternoon.

He poured the memory into the Pensieve and watched it swirl and coalesce. He leaned down, and fell into the memory.

Sunlight streamed down, the bright, golden early autumn kind. Harry stood blinking for a moment, waiting for the memory to orient itself around him. Malfoy stood just in front of him in a neatly pressed white shirt, his hair combed back and gleaming in the light. It was the same Malfoy of the mugshot, hair a bit too long, just on the wrong side of too skinny, but without the desperation. Still the exhaustion, though, smudging and blurring his features a little bit.

They were on the edge of town, just off the road and hidden behind a copse of trees. Malfoy glanced around himself. The only person around was Harry, observing but not present. He ducked his head, slid his wand from his sleeve, muttered a spell, and disappeared the mud from his shoes. He slipped his wand back up his sleeve.

Harry followed Malfoy back out onto the road, and down along it into town. Stone houses lined the road, set close together and leaning in across the streets toward each other. People milled about, walking around, or standing outside of shops and chatting. Malfoy greeted several people by name. As they walked, Harry kept a close eye on the people around them. There was no one he recognized, and no one who stood out to him as obviously magical. Everyone was dressed in perfectly normal muggle clothes for the early fall. No one came near enough to Malfoy to lift his wand off of him. They continued on.

As they approached the center of the village, Malfoy ducked suddenly into a shop, and Harry hurried after him.

The light filtered badly through the windows, and an older woman sat behind the counter, knitting. She looked up as Malfoy entered. “Oh, Draco!” she exclaimed, standing up. She came around the counter, and to Harry’s surprise, pulled Malfoy into a hug. Harry noted it. Malfoy’s wand could have been stolen now.

But when the woman pulled back, she looked at Malfoy with such warmth that Harry couldn’t bring himself to believe that she would have framed him. “Hello, Mrs Pearce,” Malfoy said, smiling.

It was, Harry thought, the first time he had seen Malfoy smile at someone. He must have seen Malfoy smile at Hogwarts at some point, across the room, perhaps, or during a Quidditch game, perhaps. He had seen Malfoy sneer and smirk and grin maliciously. He had seen, yesterday, Malfoy smile to himself while he played the piano. It had made his face young and happy. But he had never seen him look at someone and smile for them. When he smiled at someone, as he was doing now at Mrs Pearce, his expression opened. He looked easy and relaxed, like an entirely different person. Harry wondered what he would have do to get Malfoy to look at him that way.

“I’ve got the rent for you in the envelope on the counter,” Mrs Pearce said. “Are you coming for tea this weekend?”

“I was planning to,” Malfoy said. “How’s your granddaughter? She just started at St. Andrews, didn’t she?”

Mrs Pearce beamed. “Yes. She’s studying literature. She hasn’t called once since she started, which is probably a good thing. She promised to come down for my birthday, next month.”

“You hold her to that,” Malfoy said. He shook his head ruefully. “I missed sending my grandmother a letter for her birthday one year when I was little, and she withheld my birthday presents until the day she died. I got them in her will, but not a moment sooner.”

Mrs Pearce frowned. “I won’t speak ill of the dead, but old Mrs Malfoy could be a right mean old witch when she wanted to be.”

Malfoy barked a laugh. “You’re more right than you think you are.” He walked over and picked the envelope up off the table. “I have more of these to pick up, I’m afraid. I’ll see you on Saturday?”

“Yes, of course.” Mrs Pearce went back behind the counter. “Sometime when your mother is back from the continent, you must ask her to come to tea, as well.”

Malfoy grimaced. “I’m not sure when she’ll be back. But I’ll ask her.” He waved a hand, and Mrs Pearce picked her knitting back up.

Harry followed Malfoy back out onto the street. Malfoy having tea with a muggle. If someone had told him that four months ago, he would never have believed them.

He trailed after Malfoy through the town. They went into several more shops, and in each Malfoy had some variation on the first exchange with Mrs Pearce. He politely asked for the rent, and made small talk with them, asking after their families, and usually remembering at least one small personal detail to ask about. But no one after Mrs Pearce came close enough to lift Malfoy’s wand off of him. The afternoon wore on.

At last, Malfoy walked into a shop at the end of the lane, and Harry recognized Albert Shrew from the photo in the case file. This would be the row, then, that Malfoy had mentioned.

“Mr Shrew,” Malfoy greeted.

“Mr Malfoy,” Shrew said. He was a skinny man, maybe fifty years old. He stood up, wiping his hands on a cloth. “You’ve come for the rent?”

“Yes sir,” Malfoy said. “How’s business?”

“Business is good,” Shrew said. “But I wanted to talk to you about the shop, actually.”

Malfoy leaned up against the doorframe. “All right.”

Shrew rubbed at the back of his head. “I’ve been thinking. My family’s been running this shop for a couple generations now.”

Malfoy nodded neutrally. “That’s true.”

“Well, not to put to fine a point on it, but I’d like to buy the shop outright.”

Malfoy stood up straight and eyed Shrew. “I’m not selling.”

“Oh, come on, Malfoy,” Shrew said. “My mother told me about your world. She still gets the Prophet. I know why it’s you and not your father that comes round to collect the rent these days. You could use the money.”

“Be that as it may,” Malfoy said stiffly, “I’m not selling.”

“I don’t have the rent for you, then.” Shrew folded his arms.

Malfoy’s face darkened. “Shrew, you owe me the rent whether you want to buy or not. And how can you buy it off me if you won’t pay the rent?”

Shrew shrugged. “I’ll pay you a hundred thousand pounds for the shop.”

Harry watched Malfoy frown for a moment as he worked out the conversion to Galleons and back again. “It’s worth at least twice that. Probably more. And I’m not selling.” Malfoy started walking to the door. “I’ll be back in a week for the rent. If you don’t have it by then, I’ll have to get my solicitor involved.”

Shrew reddened. “How like a Malfoy.”

Harry, watching but unable to interact, bristled.

Malfoy rounded on Shrew. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“Like father, like son,” Shrew sneered. “Just a greedy little rich boy, sitting up in the manor.”

“I am not like my father,” Malfoy said quietly. He turned again and slammed the shop door open.

Shrew laughed. “You keep telling yourself that.” He followed Malfoy to the door. “And think about my offer!”

Malfoy didn’t bother to look back as he stalked off, but he shouted, “I’m not selling, Shrew!”

That was the fight, then—the motivation that Welling and Owsley’s case hinged on. It was, Harry thought, almost exactly like Malfoy had described it. If that had been all there was to the case, there would have been nothing at all.

A figure knocked into Malfoy, just for half a second, while he was walking angrily back through town. Harry jolted out of his own thoughts. He tried to focus on the figure—he caught a glimpse of a grey coat, and a hat, pulled low over the figure’s face. The figure was a little shorter than Malfoy, and broader, but he couldn’t tell anything more. They grabbed at Malfoy’s sleeve, and then continued on.

Malfoy muttered something irritably but otherwise ignored the figure. Harry tried to look back, and to follow after the figure. This had to be the person who had stolen Malfoy’s wand. But Malfoy had been preoccupied, and Harry couldn’t see anything that Malfoy had not. With every step he took away from Malfoy, and toward the figure, the memory fuzzed, and then blurred, and then disintegrated into nothing, and he was standing alone in the evidence room.

He went through the memory twice more, watching for the moment when the figure appeared, or for glimpses of the figure throughout the town as Malfoy ran his errands. He thought he might see them outside of one of the shops as Malfoy chatted, but it was just the impression of a gray coat somewhere on his periphery. He could make out no more details of the figure themselves.

Thrown out of the memory for the third time, he coaxed it back into the phial, pocketed it, and returned to his desk.

 

* * *

 

In deliberate defiance of Potter’s request that he remain in the house, Draco left the house the following morning. He had none of the flimsy muggle money left, so he set off exploring, choosing his direction somewhat randomly. The house was stifling, empty and dead, with just Kreacher and himself in it. He felt like something was itching just underneath his skin. He needed to walk as far and as long as he could until whatever it was fell out of him and he reached equilibrium again.

Maybe it was the return of his hawthorn wand. In all the years of wishing for it back—of missing the weight and the color and the inflexibility of it—he hadn’t anticipated the way it would bring with it all the memories of the years when he’d carried it. He’d not actually used it since the night before, when he pulled out the memory. He wasn’t sure what would happen if he tried. Irrationally, he feared that if he tried to cast even a simple spell, the wand would fall into old habits and curse something. Worse, he worried that it would backfire. It had done that once, during the occupation.

He still dreamed about it, sometimes: Aunt Bellatrix, standing beside him and whispering in his ear, demanding that he torture the middle-aged muggleborn witch tied on the floor in front of them; the witch looking up at him with hatred; his hand shaking so hard that he almost dropped his wand. “Just like I did to the Longbottom blood traitors,” Bellatrix had whispered, her hand tight on Draco’s arm. “Do it, Draco.” Draco couldn’t look at the muggleborn witch, couldn’t think about what he was doing, couldn’t focus on anything but the shaking of his wand, but still he had cast the Cruciatus curse. Except it had gone badly. Unexpectedly, it backfired directly into the center of his chest.

In the split-second, as the pain blossomed somewhere to the left of his heart, he’d thought of when Potter had cursed him in the bathroom, and his skin had rent apart in great bloody gashes. He’d felt the same numb surprise then, a precursor to whatever came next. And then the pain had consumed everything, white-hot and blinding, searing every nerve in his body, as if he was being turned inside out and lit on fire. He’d fallen, writhing on the floor, unable to undo the curse, his wand still clenched in his hand. All the while, Aunt Bellatrix stood over him, doing nothing but laugh her shrill manic laugh. He’d thought she might just leave him, and let him go insane like the Longbottoms. Part of him had wished for it.

After what felt like an age, Bellatrix reached down, plucked the wand from his hand, and the curse ended.

Draco had lain, panting, and waited for the world to come back into focus around him as the aftershocks of the pain faded. Bellatrix turned back to the muggleborn woman. As soon as Draco was able, he had stood and stumbled out of the house and onto the grounds. He’d hidden for three days like that, in one of the secret places he’d played in as a child, that only the house elves knew about.

Draco stopped. He had come upon a small park, only a few blocks away from Grimmauld Place. This late in the fall, it was deserted. A few birds crowded around a fallen bag.

He pulled his sleeves down farther over his hands and sat on a swing. The chains creaked a bit. Kreacher had packed him a lunch when he left—a cheese sandwich—but Draco wasn’t particularly hungry. He pulled it out and started ripping little bits of it off, and throwing them toward the birds. Soon enough, the whole flock had crowded around him. One of the birds, dull off-white and a bit larger than the rest, was bolder than the others. She pecked at Draco’s shoes, looking for more.

“You’re a bit greedy, aren’t you?” Draco asked, giving her the crust off the sandwich. “Bet that’s gotten you far in life.”

She cooed at him.

Draco kicked off the ground with his heels, setting the swing in motion. He glanced around him. There were a few muggles passing to the side of the park, but it was mostly blocked off by trees. Within the gates of the park were only him and the birds. He slid his wand out from his sleeve.

“All right, then,” he said to the white pigeon. “Let’s see if this works, why don’t we?”

She cocked her head at him.

He took a steadying breath. He pointed his wand at her and cast a quick charm, the kind he used on Aquila to keep his feathers clean. The pigeon’s feathers ruffled, and she made an indignant squawk, before flapping off. She looked much cleaner as she went.

Draco sat back, pleased. The wand had performed the spell easily. The handle was slightly warm in his hand, like it was welcoming him back. Just to see if he could, he transfigured a pebble near his toe into a small toad and then back again, and then vanished it completely. The wand performed more easily than he could ever remember it doing so before.

He passed the rest of the day similarly, changing the colors of the pigeons until they got annoyed and flapped off. When the light began to change and the shadows grew longer, he got up reluctantly. He retraced his steps until he stood in Grimmauld Place, and number twelve pushed its way out from between the neighbouring houses. He did not mention where he had gone to Potter, but he kept his wand near him for the rest of the night.

The next morning he went to the park again. He’d convinced Kreacher to pack some sesame seeds for him, and he spent the day feeding the birds and practicing some more with the wand, remembering familiar movements.

The trapped feeling didn’t leave him, though. In the back of his mind, he watched the sun and the shadows for the time, to make sure he returned before Potter came home and found him missing. More than anything, he wished for a broomstick, so he could just fly up and away from it all, and leave Grimmauld Place and Harry Potter and Malfoy Manor with all their memories far, far behind.

 

* * *

 

On Friday, Ron and Harry went out for lunch at a muggle place that had opened around the corner from the ministry entrance. Hermione, whose idea it had been in the first place, ended up having to work through lunch on a last minute crisis that had arisen with a werewolf rights bill, but she did take the time to remind them to talk about the Malfoy case.

“You looked at the memory yet?” Ron asked, after their food arrived.

Harry nodded. “There’s not much helpful. I think I’ve spotted who did it, but I can’t make out much of them. I went through it again this morning. I think they might’ve had some sort of  _confundus_  about them or something.”

“Bullocks,” Ron said.

“Funny thing, though,” Harry said thoughtfully. “All the muggles in town seemed to like him.”

“Malfoy, you mean?” Ron snorted into his soda. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” He paused and reached into a pocket inside his jacket. “Speaking of, though, I found something that might interest you.” He passed a folded sheet of paper across the table. “I was looking into this for the case I’m working on with Philips. There’s some bastard going after muggleborns who testified against the Death Eaters. Dunno if you’ve heard him talking about it. He’s obsessed, which is fair, but bloody irritating. Every few minutes, ‘Weasley, is there anything new?’ At this point, I think if I told him I read the answer in my tea leaves, he’d believe me.” Ron waved a hand. “Anyway, I was looking into the lists of muggleborns who testified and who they testified against. Notice anything interesting?”

Harry unfolded the paper and scanned the list. The right hand column listed the muggleborn, and the lefthand column the Death Eater they had testified against. Most of the names of both Death Eaters and muggleborns he recognized, but none jumped out at him.

“Middle of the page,” Ron prompted. “Just below Thomas Lewis.”

Harry looked up at Ron, surprised. “Welling testified?”

“Yeah, and look who she testified against.”

Harry felt his eyebrows raise up of their own accord. “What did she have to do with Lucius Malfoy?”

“Looked into that,” Ron said. He leaned back and took a bite of his lunch, looking utterly proud of himself. “Turns out, Welling was in hiding during the war, and it was Malfoy that found her out and dragged her into the ministry. They took her wand away because of him.”

“No wonder she hates Malfoy so much,” Harry said.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Ron said.

Harry stopped, turning it over in his mind. Welling had been so proud of capturing Malfoy, and so defensive when Harry suggested she’d made a mistake. She’d as much as said she’d just arrested him for being a Malfoy. “You don’t think she’s the one who did it, do you?”

Ron looked taken aback. “I wasn’t saying that. Do you think she did?”

Harry shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think she would. She takes her job seriously. But it’s something that’s worth thinking about, don’t you think?”

Ron grinned. “Just like old times, isn’t it? Suspicious of someone we know. Keeping an eye out for them to make a slip up.”

“The weird thing is,” Harry said, “this time, Malfoy’s on our side.”

 

* * *

 

Malfoy was in the kitchen when Harry got home, casting small showers of sparks with his wand. Something about his face was dark, and familiar. Harry watched him for a moment, without saying anything. Somehow, he was reminded of Sirius, trapped in the house, with nowhere to go.

“Get your coat,” he said. Malfoy looked up startled. “It’s Friday night. We’re going to a pub.”

“Seriously?” Malfoy asked.

“Yes, seriously,” Harry said. “It’ll do you good to get out of the house. A muggle pub, too, you should probably know.”

Malfoy looked skeptical. “I don’t have any muggle money.”

Harry waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll pay for you.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Malfoy said, beginning to look a bit offended.

“It’s not charity, don’t get your knickers in a twist,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “I wouldn’t dream of offending your pureblood sensibilities like that. You can pay me back later.”

“Well,” Malfoy stood. “All right then.” He followed Harry up into the entrance hall and shrugged on his coat. “I ate before you got home,” he said.

“That’s fine,” Harry said. He’d stayed late in the office, and grabbed a sandwich on his way out. “We’ll just get drinks then.” He pushed the door open and ushered Malfoy out. “It’s only a ten minute walk that way. Now,” he said, as they started walking. “Muggle pubs. Don’t have butterbeer, or firewhiskey—well, they generally have fireball, but that’s terrible—or any of that stuff, so you’ll have to order something else.”

“I’ll manage,” Malfoy said.

“Any idea what you’ll be wanting?”

Malfoy shrugged.

“I’m in the mood for wine myself,” Harry said, determined to keep the conversation going, even if he had to carry it in its entirety, “so we might start off with a bottle, and then see how things go from there.”

“I suppose.”

“Pub night tends to be a bit more fun if you talk.”

Malfoy shrugged again. They walked for a while in silence.

“What’s bothering you?” Harry asked, finally, as they rounded the last corner before the pub.

“Don’t worry about it, Potter.” The old animosity laced Malfoy’s words.

“You’re being a bit of an ass, Malfoy,” Harry informed him. “And here I am, trying to do something nice.”

Malfoy looked at him askance, and then forced something that may have been intended as a smile. “Sorry. I’ve been lost in my thoughts, is all.”

“Yeah, mate, I do that too sometimes.” Harry gestured to a door. “That’s the pub. C’mon.”

The inside of the pub was warm and close. They entered through a long, narrow hallway, and emerged in a wide room. Groups of people occupied most of the tables, chatting loudly. Harry guided Malfoy to a table in the far back. “I’ll go order,” he said. “White or red?”

“White,” Malfoy said.

Harry nodded and pushed his way to the bar. The bartender was an acquaintance of his, a student who kept trying to convince Harry to give him an internship. Harry smiled at him, told him apologetically that his work didn’t accept interns, and ordered.

He returned to the table a moment later with two glasses and a bottle of Pinot Grigio. “Here you go, Malfoy,” he said cheerfully. “Welcome to the world of muggle wines. They taste at least as good and the hangover isn’t half as bad.” He poured a glass for each of them.

Malfoy took one of the glasses from him and eyed it critically. “It looks like fairy wine.”

Harry grimaced. “I had fairy wine once. I think. I don’t actually remember.” It had been Ron’s twentieth birthday. Harry remembered George bringing out the bottle of wine, and the next thing he remembered was waking up the next morning, inexplicably wearing Percy’s clothes.

Malfoy sniffed at the wine, and Harry stifled a laugh. Malfoy was making the exact face he had made for most of their Hogwarts career, somewhere between disdain and mistrust. Malfoy glanced at him. “Some of us,” he said, “were taught to savour our wine before we drink it.”

Harry took a large gulp of his, just to spite Malfoy.

“You’re a lost cause.” Malfoy took a sip of his wine and shrugged, holding the glass out in front of him. “All right, it’s not bad. Definitely not fairy wine.”

“I’ll toast to that, mate.” Harry clinked his glass against Malfoy’s. Malfoy sipped at his wine a bit more, experimentally.

“It’s light, and clean,” Malfoy mused. “Refreshing.”

“Are you going to sit around and describe it all night or do you intend to drink it?”

“Oh, be quiet.” But, Harry was very interested to note, Malfoy was smiling a little bit around the corners of his mouth, the same smile from a few days before when he had played the piano.

“So, you tuned my piano,” Harry said. “What else have you been doing with yourself?”

Malfoy shrugged. “Poked around a bit.”

“Typical.”

Malfoy bristled. “As I recall, it was always you and your friends that were sticking your noses into where they didn’t belong.”

Harry frowned. “That’s not fair. It usually turned out it was related to us after all.”

Malfoy scoffed. “Now that is typical. Harry Potter, the chosen one, everything revolving around him.”

Harry shrugged and poured himself more wine. “It’s not my fault that old Tom was obsessed with me. I think that I did a pretty admirable job of rolling with it.”

At the mention of Voldemort, Malfoy put his glass down and looked away.

“Drink,” Harry advised. “And try not to look so miserable.”

“I don’t look miserable,” Malfoy snapped. He picked his wine back up all the same, and took a rather large drink from it.

In fact, Malfoy did look miserable. He’d gone quite pale, which only accentuated the dark circles under his eyes that still hadn’t faded. Whatever smile had been there before had faded altogether. Harry wanted to do something, to reach across the table, maybe, and smooth away the worried line that had appeared between Malfoy’s eyebrows. Instead, he said, “You do so. You look like you might burst into tears at any moment, and we’ve only just started drinking. Have the decency to wait until at least three drinks before you start getting weepy.”

Malfoy snorted. “I will have you know that I am not a weepy drunk. When I was ten, my father told me I was too old to cry anymore. I didn’t cry again after that.” He stopped, reflecting, and grimaced. “Well, not until I was sixteen.” He held out his glass, and Harry obligingly poured him another.

Harry shook his head. “Listen, I know you think that makes you sound cool, but it’s actually just really fucking sad. Now I’m going to start crying.”

“Bet you cry all the time, Potter.” Malfoy grinned. There was no malice in his words. It sounded almost like a joke.

“Every day,” Harry said, grinning back and playing along. “First thing in the morning. It’s part of my highly advanced plan for what Hermione calls ‘suppressing years of trauma and developing an alcohol problem by the time I’m thirty.’” He refilled his glass again, just to underscore his point.

“Brilliant,” Malfoy said. “Maybe I ought to try it.”

Harry laughed. “Yeah, give it a go.” He leaned forward across the table. “So, you went snooping in my house.”

“Exploring,” Malfoy said, holding up a finger. “There are key differences.”

“Such as?"

“Well for one, I didn’t open any of your drawers.”

“Then you missed all the interesting stuff,” Harry informed him. “My Chudley Cannon underwear collection, for example.”

Malfoy flushed and took drink of his wine.

“Malfoy, you’re blushing, which is concerning because I don’t have a Chudley Cannon underwear collection so you can’t possibly have found it,” Harry said, highly amused.

Malfoy choked a little bit on his wine, and sat coughing for a minute. Harry fought a smile.

“Please,” Malfoy said, once he could breathe again. “For the love of Morgana’s left tit, do not talk about your pants, Potter. I don’t need that image.”

Harry grinned. “If it makes you feel better, most days I don’t bother to wear any.”

“No,” Malfoy said, his voice cracking. “No, that decidedly does not make me feel better. The topic of this conversation needs to change at once.” He finished his wine. “I need another drink.”

Harry went to pour for him, only to discover that they’d somehow already finished the bottle. “I think,” he said, “that they’re making wine bottles smaller. It’s a conspiracy.”

Malfoy snorted. “I think that you pour with a heavy hand.”

Harry grimaced. “I’ll go back to the bar. What do you want?” He drained his own drink and stood up.

“What are you getting?” Malfoy asked. He leaned his elbow on the table and gazed up at Harry.

“Gin and tonic.”

“I don’t know what that is,” Malfoy admitted. “It sounds terrible.”

Harry grinned. “Want me to just order for you?”

Malfoy narrowed his eyes. “I don’t know if I trust you enough for that.”

“I’ll order for you,” Harry decided. “You don’t have any money anyway. Just wait here. I’ll be back in a tick.” Harry turned and pushed his way through the crowd to the bar. He waited for a moment, and then put his hand out to get the bartender’s attention, and ordered quietly so that Malfoy on the other side of the room couldn’t hear. A moment later, the bartender brought him the drinks, Harry paid, and headed back to the table.

“This is my gin and tonic,” he said, setting it down on his side of the table. “And this is your drink.” He set the drink down in front of Malfoy.

“What, in Merlin's name, is that?” Malfoy asked flatly.

Harry tried to not smile, but he could feel the corners of his mouth twitching. “Piña colada. Traditional muggle drink. You’ll like it, I promise.”

“What’s in it?”

Harry hesitated. “Rum, I think? And I’m not sure what else.”

Malfoy tried it. “It’s very sweet,” he said dubiously. He drank a little bit more. “And very slushy.”

“Yeah, I think that’s the appeal,” Harry commented, drinking his own gin and tonic. He wished Ron and Hermione could see this: Draco Malfoy sitting in a muggle pub and tentatively sipping at a piña colada.

“What were we talking about?” Malfoy asked, after a moment.

“I believe we were trying to get around to the point of what exactly you explored in my house.”

“I did go up to the top floor,” Malfoy admitted.

Harry nodded. He’d expected that Malfoy would go up there. “Sirius and Regulus’s rooms.”

“I went in. Looked around a bit.”

A month ago, the idea of Malfoy in Sirius’s room might have bothered Harry. It certainly would have bothered Sirius. But he found he didn’t particularly mind the idea of Malfoy standing in a room where Sirius Black had once lived and breathed.

Malfoy plucked the paper umbrella from his drink and twirled it idly. “You know I’m their cousin?”

“You said Walburga Black was your Great-Aunt.”

“Okay, technically, second cousin,” Malfoy amended.

“Yeah.” Harry tapped his nail on the side of his glass. “I have a cousin.”

Malfoy looked curious. “I didn’t know you had any family left.” He stopped. “I mean, I thought— I guess I didn’t think about it. What’s he like?”

Harry shrugged. “Horrible, mostly. He’s gotten a bit better the past few years. He was awful as a child. Absolutely spoiled rotten.”

“Did you live with your cousin’s family, then?”

“Dumbledore dropped me on the doorstep the night my parents died,” Harry said.

“What, just left you outside the front door like a parcel?” Malfoy demanded, scandalized.

“Yep,” said Harry.

“And you’re the one whose spent several years trying to convince me he wasn’t absolutely mental.”

Harry shrugged. “Blood magic. Protected me from Voldemort.”

Malfoy winced, and continued to look disbelieving. “What were they like, then?”

Harry eyed Malfoy. “I slept in a cupboard until I got my Hogwarts letter.”

“Oh.” Malfoy didn’t say anything for a moment. He drank more of his piña colada, and then looked up at Harry. “Well that’s bloody fucking horrible.”

Harry stared at Malfoy for a moment. Malfoy stared back, absolutely sincere. Then, Harry started laughing, because Malfoy was right, it was bloody fucking horrible, and in twenty-two years, he was pretty sure Draco Malfoy was the first person to actually say so.

“It’s really not funny, Potter,” Malfoy said, looking at him like he’d gone mad. “I’m pretty sure it’s illegal.”

“No, you’re right,” Harry said. “You’re absolutely right. They really were awful. Extremely traumatic.”

When he looked at Malfoy again, after a moment, Malfoy was still staring at him, his eyes wide and stormy gray. His pupils were blown. His hair gleamed golden in the dim light of the pub. Funny how Harry used to think of Malfoy in shades of green and silver, but now he was all golden and pale ivory.

“I’m sorry,” Malfoy said, quietly. “You didn’t deserve that.”

Harry shrugged and looked away. “Not your fault.”

“Yeah, but,” Malfoy swallowed. “I didn’t exactly make things better at Hogwarts, did I?”

Harry took a drink, to give himself some time. “You were a child.” They’d all been children. That was the most unfair part of it all.

“That’s not an excuse,” Malfoy persisted.

"When did you grow up this much?"

Malfoy's mouth twisted into a grimace. "I didn't mean to. But after the war, I didn't want to be that person anymore."

"I know what you mean."

"Sometimes I don't think I've changed enough."

Harry sighed. He was, he decided, neither quite sober enough nor quite drunk enough to have this conversation. “You’re making this too dark, mate. Pub night is supposed to be fun.”

“Yeah,” Malfoy said. “All right.”

Harry reached over and flicked a bit of hair out of Malfoy’s face. Perhaps he was drunker than he thought he was. “You should cut your hair.”

Malfoy waved Harry away, and ran his hands through his hair. “You don’t like it?” he asked. “Thought it made me look a bit rakish, myself.”

Harry shook his head. “It gets in your face.”

Malfoy hummed in agreement. “You sound like my mother.”

“Heaven forbid,” Harry said, laughing. He finished his drink. “I’ll be right back,” he informed Malfoy. Malfoy waved him off. Again, he went the bar, and he returned a moment later with another gin and tonic. “I got a double this time,” he informed Malfoy. “Less getting up that way.”

In the meantime, Malfoy had finished the majority of his piña colada, and was looking rather worse for wear. “D’you ever think,” he asked, “about all the people you didn’t get a chance to meet?”

“All the fucking time.” Harry grimaced.

“Yeah.” Malfoy was staring at a name someone had carved into the table and steadfastly refusing to meet Harry’s eye. “Regulus played seeker on the Slytherin team.”

It took Harry a moment to catch up to what Malfoy was talking about. He, suddenly and for no discernible reason, wanted to reach across and take Malfoy’s hand in his. “Yeah,” he said, quietly. “I noticed that too.”

“When did Regulus join the Death Eaters?”

“Why does that matter?” Harry asked.

“Just tell me,” Malfoy insisted.

“Sixteen,” Harry conceded, reluctantly.

“Same as me, then.” Something about that seemed to satisfy Malfoy. He drank the last of his piña colada.

“He defected,” Harry told him. “He tried to destroy one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes. That’s how he died.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Not many people do.”

Malfoy nodded. “I’d just been thinking— I wish I’d known him, is all.”

“I think,” Harry said slowly, “I think that he’d have liked you.”

Malfoy shrugged. “I didn’t actually defect, did I? Just— Just hid outside the manor and was generally a bit of a coward.”

Harry did reach over then, and grabbed Malfoy’s hand off the table. Malfoy looked up at him, his expression—trusting, maybe, or open, or something else, something that Harry couldn’t name, but that he never thought he’d see in Malfoy. “Malfoy,” he said. “Draco. You were a  _child_. What matters is what you’ve done since then.”

“You were a child, too,” Malfoy pointed out. “You were a child, and you defeated him. Multiple times.”

Harry scoffed. “I just did what Dumbledore told me to do. There’s nothing particularly courageous about that. Anyway, it was your wand that defeated Voldemort.”

Malfoy looked at him. “Potter,” he said. “That sounds so unbelievably dirty. Please, never speak again.”

Harry started laughing, yet again, and Malfoy started laughing, too. It was very strange, to be laughing with Malfoy. It felt like they were friends, and like they understood each other. They had both been so young. They had all been so young, and so much had been asked of them. How was it fair to expect them to know what was right? How was it fair to let them make the choices they had been forced to make?

Harry was still holding onto Malfoy’s hand. He turned it palm up, and then slid his own hand up, onto Malfoy’s forearm, until it was resting over where the Dark Mark was hidden beneath his sleeve. “I’m sorry, Draco.”

“I like it when you call me Draco,” he whispered. “I don’t like feeling like my father.”

“Then I’ll call you Draco,” Harry said. He hesitated. “I wish things had been different. I wish we could have been friends.”

Draco looked down. His hair fell into his face again. “Me too.”

They sat for a moment, like that, Harry’s hand over Draco’s forearm, and Draco looking away, and then Harry stood. “We should go back.” The room wobbled around him a little bit.

Draco stood, swaying a little bit. “I am very drunk,” he said. “There was a lot— whatever. A lot of alcohol in that— what was that?”

“Piña colada,” Harry said, guiding Draco to the door.

The walk home was longer than the walk there, with neither of them able to walk entirely straight. They didn’t say much along the way, neither of them sure of what exactly had passed between them in the pub.

“In all honesty,” Harry said, suddenly, as they came up to the door of Grimmauld Place, “we weren’t exactly amazing to you either.”

“Yes, I remember getting punched in the face on at least one occasion,” Draco commented dryly. He leaned against the doorframe while Harry fumbled for the key.

“You deserved that.” Harry tried the key in the lock, dropped it, and tried again. “I was thinking more of, of the time, second year, we were sure you were the heir of Slytherin—turned out to be Voldemort, of course, first Horcrux I destroyed, although, in our defense, your father planted it on Ginny, but anyway—we brewed Polyjuice potion in Moaning Myrtle’s bathroom and disguised ourselves as Crabbe and Goyle to try and get you to admit to it.”

Draco pushed himself up straight, eyes wide, and pointed at Harry accusingly. “I knew it! I have suspected this for years! Pansy said I was being paranoid, but I knew it!”

At last, Harry managed to get the key fitted into the lock, and the door swung open. “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t done it,” he informed Draco. “But I did do it. It was Hermione’s idea, too. She turned herself into a cat, though.”

“Turned herself into a cat?” Draco demanded. “How on earth did she do that?”

“Millicent Bulstrode’s cat’s hair,” Harry said mournfully. “Fatal mistake. You must never speak of this to her.”

They stumbled up the stairs, Draco following Harry. “Think I might just sleep in the drawing room,” Draco said, when they made it to the first floor.

“Can you, do you think,” Harry asked, struck by a sudden idea, “play Beethoven?”

“What, right now?”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “I want to hear you play.”

“We are about to fall over, we’re so drunk,” Draco said. “I’ve not been this drunk since, since, beginning of the summer. Pansy’s birthday. She dragged us to some concert.”

Harry grinned. “So make it a concert now. Play for me, Draco.”

Draco scowled. “Oh, all right. C’mon then.”

They went into the drawing room, and Draco sat down at the piano. Harry collapsed onto the couch. “You play very sad music,” he observed, “but you look happy when you play.”

Draco opened the piano. Harry watched his hands. “This is my favourite,” he said. “Beethoven’s Sonata twenty-three. The second movement. I’m too drunk to play the first. This one is  _andante con moto_.”

“What does that mean?” Harry asked.

Draco began to play. “Slowly, with feeling.”

At first, it was just a series of chords, tripping into each other, down the piano. Draco’s hands moved slowly and surely. Gracefully. Harry liked the way Draco’s hands moved. He liked the way Draco looked down at the keys as he played, as if they were the only thing left in the world. He liked the way Draco looked as he played. The simplicity of the music sounded somehow melancholy as a hint of the melody emerged and then retreated.

He thought he could hear Draco humming to himself.

It was just a single theme, repeated but varied. With each change to it, Draco added something. It built on itself, while going nowhere at all.

Something shifted, and the treble clef came through—sixteenth notes moving in circles to form the melody, familiar, although Harry couldn’t remember from where. He thought of Draco at the pub, all ivory and golden, unshuttering himself one note at a time. This would be Draco’s favourite. Sweet, and simple, like reprieve or mercy, or unlooked-for kindness. A single, suspended, unmoving moment, like the instant before falling asleep.

Harry closed his eyes. He was sure Draco was humming along.

“It’s lovely,” Harry said, smiling.

Draco huffed a breath as he began a run of thirty-second notes. If Harry looked, he knew Draco would be smiling too. He could feel himself drifting off to sleep. “Good night, Draco,” he said.

Harry was already half in a dream when he heard, softly against the piano music, “Good night, Harry.”

 

* * *

 

Draco waited on the swing in the park, letting it sway back and forth. The white pigeon pecked at his toes. He’d been waiting for a while, and his warming charm was beginning to wear off.

He heard a faint crack, and looked up. Pansy Parkinson stood a few feet away. “Hullo, Pansy,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

“We’ve all been worried sick,” she told him. “Greg’s convinced you’ve gone off to Europe, and Theo thinks it’s the start of a more active policy against former Death Eaters. Even Blaise brought you up a few times, and you know how Blaise likes to pretend he doesn’t care.” She looked him up and down as she spoke. “You look terrible.”

Draco groaned and kicked off the ground. “I’ve not been sleeping well.”

“I can see that.”

“Sit down,” Draco said. “Stop standing and looking judgmental. It’s giving me a tension headache.”

“You say that about everything,” Pansy said crossly. She sat in the swing beside him. “So, where’ve you been then? We’re all absolutely dying to know.”

“You’re dying to go running off to Rita Skeeter and sell her the story, you mean,” Draco said.

“When have I ever been so mercenary?” Pansy flicked her wand at the pigeon, and transfigured her neatly into a nightingale.

“Turn her back,” Draco chided.

Pansy did so, grimacing. “But honestly, Draco, where have you been?”

“Harry Potter bailed me out,” Draco said, shortly.

Pansy let out a low whistle. “Well, that’s unexpected. Did he demand you join his ranks of devoted followers, then?”

Draco shook his head. “He told me repeatedly I didn’t owe him anything.”

Pansy snorted. “How very like a Gryffindor. All nobility and no tact.”

“I’ve been staying with him,” Draco said. “To avoid reporters, and all that. It’s why I haven’t owled you before.” He’d sent off an owl to Pansy mid-Saturday morning, when he woke up, sprawled in an armchair in the drawing room, with a pounding headache. Potter—Harry—had been awake already, making breakfast in the kitchen. Neither of them had spoken of the night before, and he honestly didn’t know how much Harry remembered, except that both of them were now cautiously on a first name basis.

Now, Pansy looked properly interested. “Draco Lucius Malfoy, are you telling me that you are staying in the same house as your boyhood enemy and longstanding crush?”

“I didn’t have a crush on him,” Draco muttered.

“Sure you didn’t, dear,” Pansy scoffed. “Six years, and all I heard was ‘Potter this,’ and ‘Potter that.’ And, darling, it wasn’t like you were disguising the fact that you’re an absolutely useless homosexual.”

“I’m not denying the last part,” Draco said. “Just the first.”

“You also, I notice, said you  _didn’t_  have a crush on him. You did not say that you do not  _currently_ have a crush on him.” Pansy looked downright gleeful.

“Your logic is a twisted and beautiful thing,” Draco informed her.

“And rarely wrong,” Pansy agreed. “So, you’ve fallen head over heels for the Golden Boy of the Order of the Pheonix. This ought to be a shit show.” She leaned back on the swing, and then forward, so that it began to move back and forth. “You know, I really should sell this story to Rita Skeeter. Can you imagine?”

Draco groaned. “I can, actually. It’d be a nightmare.”

“Yes, well,” Pansy said, hopping to the ground from the highest point of the swing’s arc. “We’ve enough of those, don’t we?”

“We went to the pub on Friday,” Draco told her. “And he—he held my hand? And touched my hair. And asked me to play him the piano. He might have also talked about his underwear.”

“That sounds promising.”

“Yeah, but it’s been three days and he hasn’t said anything about it.” Draco had been hoping, all weekend, that something might be said, that Harry might give him some sort of sign that it all meant what Draco hoped it meant. There had been nothing.

Pansy made a dismissive noise. “What do you expect? He’s a boy. A British boy. A British boy with a lot of repressed trauma and probably some emotional issues of his own. Besides, do we even know if he’s gay? Wasn’t he dating the Weasley girl?”

“They broke up,” Draco said.

“That’s that, at least, then.” Pansy put her hands on her hips. “Oh, love, you really do look unhappy. Let’s go do something together. I’ve a bit of muggle money, why don’t we go to the cinema? I’ve always wanted to try that.”

Draco stood up. “Sure. Sure, why not? Did you know I took a taxi the other day?”

“I’m very proud of you,” she said. “Real growth of character.”

She linked her arm in his, and he let his head fall onto her shoulder. She turned her face, and kissed the top of his head, sweetly. “What am I going to do?” he asked, miserably.

“You’re going to have to seduce a Gryffindor,” Pansy said, matter-of-factly. “This is a challenge I’m sure you’re up to, Malfoy.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The piece Draco plays in this chapter is [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ak_7tTxZrk&;t=845s)


	5. Forte-Piano

Harry spotted it the last week of November, but, with Welling only a desk over and looking through paperwork, he couldn’t immediately get Ron’s attention to tell him. Instead, he closed the files and shut them in a drawer in his desk, and tried to focus on the work he should have actually been doing. Two months after the Latvia case had supposedly been closed, dark artifacts with Latvian ties were beginning to surface again on the black market, and the department had asked Harry to take the lead on the case again.

Welling glanced up at him, anyway. “You’ve got that look, Potter,” she observed. “The one you get when you hit something big, and you think you’re going to finally get to bust someone’s door down. What’d you find?” She had been doing this lately: being unusually friendly in an apparent effort to work her way back into Harry’s good graces.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just something that could be a pattern.” Ron glanced up and caught Harry’s eye. Harry nodded as subtly as he could.

Welling hummed approvingly. “Good luck.”

“Thanks,” he said. She returned to her work.

He waited a while longer, unable to actually focus on the Latvia case. Supposedly, someone in Edinburgh was helping to smuggle in the dark artifacts, but no one knew who it was for sure. Someone else in Knockturn Alley, a man named Pryor, was suspected of selling the artifacts on to Wizarding Britain.

Ron kept looking over at Harry.

After a bit, Harry gave up entirely on trying to focus. He stood abruptly, intending to take a bit of a walk and clear his head. Ron got up behind him, and followed him into the lift. “Let’s go to Hermione’s office,” Ron said quietly. “Welling keeps looking at you.”

“Yeah, cause it’s not at all suspicious when you follow me out of the office,” Harry commented, dryly.

Ron shrugged. “Welling’s already suspicious. As long as she doesn’t know what we have, who cares?” He nudged Harry. “You do have something, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “I’ll tell you when we get to Hermione’s.”

Ron nodded.

Hermione looked up when the two of them entered her office, and, without saying anything, flicked her wand at the door so that it swung closed. “You’ve found something.”

Harry nodded. “I was thinking about what we said, about other people being framed, and I’m already working on the Latvia case again, so I looked into arrest records.” He glanced between Ron and Hermione. Both of them seemed on board so far. “I left the file in my desk, but there’ve been seven former Death Eaters—or suspected Death Eaters, or Death Eater collaborators—arrested for possession since August. On the face of it, that’s not necessarily surprising, but I was thinking about what Draco—“ He stopped. Calling Draco by his first name in the privacy of his home was one thing, but it felt extraordinarily strange to do so in front of Ron and Hermione. Neither had reacted though, so he pushed on. “What Draco said about everyone being very careful, so I looked back at the months prior to that, and there was a definite spike. From January to July, only three arrests were made.”

“That’s still not definitely something,” Ron said, “but it’s not nothing.”

“There’s more. Remember what you found about Welling?”

Ron nodded.

“Guess who arrested four of the seven since August.”

Hermione bit her lip. “You can’t just accuse a ministry employee of that kind of corruption,” she warned. “It does look like there might be something, but you’re going to have to be careful. Who made the other arrests?”

“Mason, Philips,” Harry hesitated. “Ron, you arrested someone back in October.”

Ron leaned against the wall, looking thoughtful. “Yeah, Flint. Marcus Flint’s father.”

“Was there anything about it that seemed, I dunno, off to you somehow?” Hermione asked. “If Harry’s right…”

Ron scratched at his cheek. “It was over a cursed fountain pen. The kind of thing that ends up sold to a muggle and killing someone. If you started writing with it, you couldn’t stop, and it would end up draining you bit by bit.”

Harry grimaced.

“At the time, Flint kept insisting it wasn’t his. Someone had given it to him, he said, which none of us gave much stock to because that’s what everyone says, but I suppose it’s possible he was telling the truth.”

“It’d not be the first time that we’ve seen something like that happen,” Harry pointed out, thinking of Katie Bell sixth year.

“So, whoever did this would have to have access to a lot of cursed artifacts,” Hermione said.

“August was when I left for Latvia,” Harry said. “There was a whole locker full of cursed objects that someone could take from.”

“Are any of them missing?” Hermione asked.

“Well, no,” he conceded. “Or at least, not that anyone’s noticed. But they didn’t arrest the main sellers until just before I got back.”

“It’s something,” Hermione said, tapping her fingers on her desk. “Don’t say anything about it yet, though. Not until you have more.”

“I’ll look back at the Flint case,” Ron volunteered. “There’s a hearing for it coming up, anyway. See if he has any details on who supposedly gave it to him.”

“And I’ll keep working on Latvia, I guess,” Harry said, sighing. “Fuck, I wish we could look at this more directly.”

Ron clapped him on the shoulder. “We’re getting there. It just takes time.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Come on, we ought to get back to our desks. Welling’ll be worried we’re up to something.”

“Do you ever,” Harry asked, as they waved goodbye to Hermione and headed back to the lift, “get the feeling Welling’s just Snape all over again? Always convinced we’re up to no good?”

“Nah, mate,” Ron said, hitting the button to take them back up. “She’s bad in her own special, unique way. Oh hey, don’t forget it’s Ginny’s big game tonight.”

Harry grimaced. The lift doors opened again on their floor. “I had forgotten, thanks.”

“Come over to ours?” Ron asked.

Harry thought of Draco, already left alone all day in the empty house. “No, thank you.”

 

* * *

 

 

Since the night at the Pub, Harry and Draco had reached a tentative but friendly detente. They ate their meals together, and spoke generally about nothing, but they also spoke now about more than the case. After dinner, they seemed to mostly find their way to the drawing room, where Harry would read or putter about, while Draco played on the piano.

Harry had the feeling that Draco was somehow trying—making an effort to be more agreeable. Harry himself was: he went out of his way to seek Draco out throughout the day, and to chase after the hints of a smile that sometimes appeared when Draco thought he wasn’t paying attention. The echo of Draco that night after the pub, wishing Harry a good night, seemed to linger over both of them, coloring whatever this new thing between them was.

Harry told Draco about the pattern they had found over dinner in the kitchen. Kreacher had made steak pies for the night. Draco nodded as Harry spoke. “The Flint family’s an old one, and they’re just about as Slytherin as they come, but they don’t get involved with dark objects,” he said, looking thoughtful. “Something about an old family curse.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah, some ancestor or another was a ship captain.” Draco shrugged. “Apparently, he came into some treasure—through what Christina Flint will insist were perfectly legal means, although Marcus always liked to put about that he’d been some sort of pirate. Anyway, supposedly he put a curse on it when he buried it, and it ended up killing quite a few of the searchers. Made quite a stir at the time, you can imagine. It’s still a whole family scandal.”

“When was this?” Harry asked.

Draco frowned. “Mid-eighteenth century? I’m not sure. Anyway, then the whole family backed the Jacobites, and once they lost that particular revolution the rumor started up that Captain Flint had cursed the whole family as well.”

“So,” Harry said, “it’s unlikely that Nicolas Flint would have a cursed object in his home.”

Draco tilted his head towards Harry, acknowledging. “It’s not impossible, I suppose,” he conceded. “But I’d wager against it.”

Harry nodded, pleased. “Good, we have a lead then.”

They cleared up from dinner together, in a rhythm they had fallen into over the past several days, and then moved to the drawing room. Draco sat at the piano, and began to play. Harry briefly contemplated working on some of his paperwork, but picked up a novel Hermione had lent him instead.

“You always play Beethoven,” Harry remarked, after a moment, as Draco moved onto his second piece. “Is that all you know?”

When he looked up, Draco had stopped playing and was looking at him, faintly amused. “I like Beethoven.”

“But it’s always so depressing,” Harry complained. A line of consternation had appeared between Draco’s eyebrows. Harry liked the way Draco seemed unable to decide whether or not he should be offended. He liked that he could needle Draco like this lately, pushing with no real malice, like they were friends. “Can’t you play something less sturm und drang?”

“This,” Draco informed him, “is not sturm und drang. Although, I’m impressed you know the term at all.”

“I know a lot of things,” Harry said, stupidly pleased at the wry fondness in Draco’s tone.

“I’m sure,” Draco said. “What do you want me to play, then?”

Harry closed his book, and looked at Draco considering. Draco wasn’t facing him—he’d turned back to the piano and sat, paging through the sheet music, his elbows braced against the piano. Draco had, he thought, put on some weight since coming to Grimmauld Place. Some days, he still had that wary, exhausted look about him, and Harry had to coax him down out of his room, wheedling at him to play the piano or just to come read with him; but the sharp hungry look, like broken-glass edges, had faded.

“Play something you liked when you were a kid,” Harry said, at last. He did not say: _play something from before you acquired any sharp edges at all._

Draco looked thoughtful for a long, quiet moment. “Let me see if they have the music.” He stood up and opened the bench. Harry, admittedly, hadn’t even known the bench opened.

“It was Walburga who played,” Draco commented. “It must have been. I mean, I suppose Orion might have played too, but the music they have all runs much more toward Walburga’s taste.”

“Do you think Sirius would have learned?” Harry asked, curious.

Draco shook his head. “Probably not. Even if Walburga had tried to teach him—which, she probably did—I doubt he would have been the type to take to it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Draco was unfazed by the sudden hostility that had sneaked into Harry’s tone without him meaning it. “What I said. Listen, your godfather wanted to rebel against the family, right? So he wasn’t going to sit around practicing the piano for hours, was he?” Draco pulled a book from the pile. “This’ll do.”

“Did you spend hours practicing?” Harry asked. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around the image of the proud and cold and cruel Draco Malfoy of their school days playing the piano.

Draco turned to him and quirked his lips, a little wry, a little bitter, as if he could guess what Harry was thinking. “Having trouble picturing it?” he asked.

Harry shrugged. “A little, yeah.”

Draco flipped the book open to a piece and set it open on the piano. “Just because you didn’t see something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. You’ve never been the most observant when it comes to people.”

Part of Harry, the old, angry part of him, rose to that bait, as familiar as any old barb of Draco’s. But what he liked to think of as the better part of himself sat back and turned that over. Much to his chagrin, it occurred to him that he had been thinking of the Draco he knew now, the Draco who played the piano for him, as different that the Draco he had gone to Hogwarts with. Not separate, but new. But, as he thought about it, he realized something of this Draco must have been there the entire time.

“What are you going to play?” Harry asked, rather than give voice to any of his thoughts.

“A Bach invention,” Draco answered. “My tutor made me spend the whole summer after second year learning it.” He drew himself up and affected a nasally and grating voice. “‘Mr Malfoy! If you do not get the right hand up to speed, you shall never play piano again!’” Draco relaxed and splayed his fingers across the keys. “I think I drove my father absolutely mental with it.”

“He probably deserved it,” Harry commented, without thinking, like he were talking to Ron or Hermione.

Draco glanced over at him. At his look, Harry wished he could take the words back. As much as he hated Lucius, Draco was his son, and there were some things that should not be said. Harry knew far too well what it felt like to have people offer unsolicited opinions on an absent father. But Draco just shrugged and looked back at the music. “Let’s see, then,” he said to himself.

He began to play. The piece was brief, and trilling, the melody passed off deftly from one hand to another. A couple times, Draco paused, squinted at the music, and then replayed a measure before continuing. Although the piece was lighter, like Harry had asked for, Draco looked more intense. In the lighting, his eyes looked pale and focused, like hard bits of glass. And yet, it was a focus without the edges, something smooth and sleek and not yet used or broken. If he tried, he could imagine Draco, just turned thirteen years old, haltingly practicing this, his biggest problem complaining to his father about Harry Potter.

“I used to be better at that,” Draco said, as he finished. “Was that more like what you were thinking?

“Yeah,” said Harry. “Listen—I shouldn’t have said that about your father.”

“No, it’s fine,” said Draco. “I mean, I understand.” He paused. “He’s still my father, though. He— he wasn’t a bad father. I know he must have looked that way to you, and I do— I hate him.” Draco tugged at his left sleeve, unconsciously. “I hate him for everything during the war, and I hate him for harboring fugitives after the war, and getting himself arrested and sent off to Azkaban, and I hate him for a lot of the things he did before the war, too, but…” Draco trailed off.

“But he was your father,” Harry said. He wanted to reach out again, like he had in the pub, and take Draco’s hand in his. “Things aren’t black and white. Not now. Things can be complicated.” Things were complicated. Draco Malfoy was accused of murder and sat in Harry Potter’s drawing room. Harry believed he was innocent, and more than that, liked him. Liked the way he played the piano and hummed to himself as he played and teased Harry without meaning any of it. He liked the way a lock of Draco’s white-blond hair still fell in his face, and the way he held himself perfectly straight, as if bending even a little would shatter him. He liked the way Draco’s pale, focused gaze had turned to him now, at last completely and heartbreakingly open, and grateful.

He didn’t know when he began liking these things about Draco, but none of it felt new or unfamiliar at all.

He looked away from Draco, sure that something of his thoughts had spilled over onto his face. His gaze fell on the clock instead. “Oh, shit. Ginny’s match’ll be starting soon.”

Draco nodded, and turned back to the piano as Harry stood.

Harry hesitated. “Draco,” he said. “Come to the kitchen and listen with me?”

Draco smiled at Harry, a slow, proper smile that lit up his entire face. Harry wished Draco could look like this always. “Yeah, all right. What teams are playing?”

“Well,” said Harry, leading the way, “Ginny’s a Chaser for the Holyhead Harpies, so we’re rooting for them, obviously. If you pull against them just to spite the Weasleys, I will kick you out of my house.” He glanced back, grinning. “They’re playing the Brighton Beetles.”

“I don’t really follow women’s Quidditch,” Draco confessed.

“You remember Heidi Macavoy?”

“The Hufflepuff Chaser?”

“Yeah, her.” Harry pushed open the kitchen door and flicked the radio on with a twitch of his wand.

“She was awful.”

“As a Chaser, yeah, but she’s a wicked good Beater for the Beetles, and she plays a bit dirty. Oh, good, it hasn’t started yet.”

The announcers on the radio were talking about the teams, and discussing the betting odds for both. The Beetles were favored by a small margin, but not much. Draco and Harry sat at the table, the radio in between them. 

“I should root for the Beetles,” Draco said after a moment. “Sounds like they’ve had the better season.”

Harry fixed him with a glare. “You’re supposed to root for a team regardless of whether they’re winning.”

Draco grinned. “Where’s the fun in that?"

“I will throw you directly out of my house,” Harry threatened. Draco was biting his lip, the only flushed thing in his pale face. Harry had the odd thought then, that if he were to lean across the table and catch Draco’s lips with his own, Draco wouldn’t object.

“You won’t do that, Harry,” Draco said, with an easy confidence that Harry couldn’t mistake for arrogance if he tried to. “You’re far too nice.”

But before Harry could figure out what to say in response to that, the radio announced that the players had just kicked off the pitch. The Beetles got the Quaffle first, and the game commenced. Draco pulled ironically for the Beetles the entire time, and Harry couldn’t muster up even the slightest annoyance with him. When the Harpies won in the end, Draco smiled across the table at Harry.

Harry felt something inside of himself melt and break, just a little bit.

 

* * *

 

 

“I thought,” Hermione said, bemused, “that we already had this crisis after you and Ginny broke up."

“That was this crisis in the abstract,” Harry said. He sat in her office, with his back against the door. “This is the same crisis, in the specific.”

“I see,” said Hermione, skeptically.

“Look, its entirely different when I’m going, ‘Oi, Hermione, I think blokes are pretty great in the same way girls are,’ and when I’m going, ‘Oi, Hermione, Draco Malfoy is staying in my house and I’d like to do any number of unspeakable things to him.’”

Hermione sighed and rolled her eyes. “Well, do you think he feels the same way?”

“I don’t even know if he’s straight or not!” Harry let his head thunk back against the door. “You’d think after seven years basically stalking him, I’d have figured that out at least.”

“We generally had different things on our minds,” she pointed out.

“Just,” Harry sighed. “I mean, Draco’s always been pretty, right? But now I have _feelings_ about him, and you know how bad I am with feelings.”

Hermione frowned. “I’ve never thought him particularly good looking.”

“Hermione, are you blind?”

“He’s too,” she gestured at her face, “pointy.” She shrugged. “And pale.”

“You’re marrying a Weasley. It doesn’t get much paler,” Harry pointed out.

“Yeah, but I’ve always found something a little off-putting about blond men,” Hermione said. “I think we’re missing the point here, Harry. Did you say that you think Draco has always been pretty?”

“Well, yeah,” Harry said, suddenly very uncomfortable with the way that Hermione was grinning at him. “I just assumed this was accepted fact.”

Hermione snorted. “You always assume your opinions of people are accepted fact.”

“That’s— okay, that might be true,” Harry conceded. “Are you telling me that Draco isn’t attractive?”

“He’s not unattractive, I suppose. Look, the point is, I think you’ve had feelings for him for quite a bit longer than you’re willing to admit, if you think he’s ‘always been pretty.’”

Harry groaned and buried his face in his hands. “What am I going to do, Hermione? I am not emotionally equipped to handle this.”

“Well, for starters, I’d finish solving his case.” Hermione tapped her pen on the edge of her desk. “And then, oh, I don’t know, you know how it went with Ron and me, it took time! Just keep being friendly with him, I suppose.”

“You’re useless. I should have talked to Ginny about this.”

“Have you come out to Ginny yet?”

Harry had not yet, despite two years of Hermione’s constant nagging. He kept hoping that it would slip out casually and he could avoid having an awkward conversation about it, but as with most things, luck was against him. Ron thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Harry started to say something in his defense, but someone chose that moment to push Hermione’s door open. It collided painfully with his back. He scooted forward so the door could open fully, and glared at whoever was interrupting them.

Ron’s head poked in. “Hi, Harry, figured I’d find you here. Hi, Hermione, love, Mum asked if you could pop by tonight for more wedding planning. Is that all right?”

“Yes, that’s fine, but I might be in a bit late today,” Hermione answered.

“I’ll let her know. Harry, something happened with the Cartwright case.”

Harry stood up, refocusing his priorities as he went. “New information on the murders?”

Ron scoffed. “Not bloody likely. Oscar Cartwright was just arrested. They want you in to interrogate him. You’ve got a relationship with him or whatever.”

“All right,” Harry said. He turned back to Hermione. “This conversation is not over.”

She laughed, and he followed Ron out and back to the lift.

“What’s he been arrested for?”

Ron looked at him askance. “Nominally for fighting, but what’s more interesting is the guy he was fighting. The Knocturn Alley fence for your Latvia ring. Got away before they realized who he was.”

That certainly piqued Harry’s attention. “What was he doing with him?”

Ron shrugged. “You know Cartwright. He’s into all sorts of shady business. They’ve got him in interrogation room five.”

Harry sighed, and went down.

 

* * *

 

 

In all honesty, Harry hated the interrogation rooms. During the war, the rooms had been used to interrogate muggleborns accused of stealing their wands. Though it had never been confirmed, Harry suspected that the Death Eaters had tortured people within them as well. Once the ministry had been retaken, everyone had tried not to think too hard about that. But he had spent too much time in them after the war, going through all the horrific stories of survivors, and the maniacal bragging of some of the more fanatical Death Eaters. To walk back into them made his skin crawl with the memories.

Cartwright was sitting at the table, as surly as the last time that Harry had seen him. “Heya, Potter,” he said, as Harry entered.

“Good afternoon, Cartwright,” Harry answered. He picked up the file on the table and flipped through it idly. A couple of Aurors had picked Cartwright up in Knockturn Alley when a storefront had exploded in the crossfire from a duel. At the time, Cartwright had been covered in boils, and his opponent’s head had been swollen to twice its normal size. Harry glanced up at Cartwright. Evidently, the Aurors had made a stop at St. Mungo’s before bringing him in.

“Why can’t you manage to stay out of trouble?” Harry asked with a sigh.

“Why can’t you manage to arrest the people who killed my parents?” Cartwright demanded.

Harry sighed again and closed the file. “Listen, Oscar. I’m sorry about your parents. I’m sorry the case is still open. In all honesty, though, it’s probably going to be open for a lot longer. We’re still uncovering new information about things that happened during the war every day. One of these days it’ll be your parents. But realistically, whoever killed your parents is probably already dead or in Azkaban.”

Cartwright sneered. “Me and you know perfectly well there are Death Eaters who are neither.”

“That’s not what you’re here about this time,” Harry said. “You’re here because, for some reason, you were dueling in broad daylight in Knockturn Alley.”

“Ain’t a wizard allowed a little bit of friendly dueling?” Cartwright leaned back in his chair.

“No, public dueling’s been banned since 1940.” Harry tapped his finger against the file on the table. “What were you dueling about, anyway?”

Cartwright shrugged. “We had a disagreement.”

“Yeah,” Harry snorted. “That much is obvious. What happened?”

He looked away, his face drawn. “I know the ministry’s been after him.”

“All right,” Harry said, neutrally.

“I mean,” Cartwright pressed, “I can give you information on Pryor.”

Pryor was, of course, not the real name of the man that Cartwright had been caught dueling. The ministry wasn’t entirely sure of his real name. Harry was reluctantly interested. “What can you tell me?”

Cartwright barked a laugh. “Not giving it to you that easily, mate,” he said. “You gotta do something for me.”

Harry rolled his eyes. If he didn’t pity Cartwright, he’d have long ago written him off as a slimy, manipulative git. There seemed to be very few depths to which he would not stoop. “All right, how’s this?” Harry leaned forward across the table. “If your information pans out and is helpful, I’ll get them to reduce the fine for the dueling by half.”

“Drop it altogether.”

He shook his head. “Can’t do that. There’s got to be some measure of law and order around.”

“First I’ve heard of it.”

Harry frowned at him. “There’s only so much I can do,” he said. “I could assume you’re lying and ramp up the charges against you. This isn’t the first time you’ve been caught in a fight, and I’m sure I could dredge someone up who’d call it assault.”

“You wouldn’t do that,” Cartwright said, with far too much confidence for a man in his position. “You feel bad for me.”

“I’ve felt bad for a lot of people,” Harry said. “Doesn’t mean I let them off.”

Cartwright crossed his arms in front of him and sat suddenly forward. “Alright then, Potter. Half the fine. Here’s what I know. I want that official-like.”

Harry nodded, and flicked his wand. Two pieces of parchment appeared above the table and fluttered down. Written on them in gold ink were the terms of the deal. “Official ministry guarantee,” Harry said, handing one copy to Cartwright and keeping the other one for himself.

Cartwright nodded. “Pryor’s been selling dark magic to all sorts of folks down Knockturn Alley.”

The ministry already knew this, and had been staking the alley out for weeks, but Pryor was careful. Despite the open secret that he was the main British contact for the Latvia ring, they couldn’t definitively link him to it, especially not now that Harry and the Latvian Aurors had arrested the majority of the main cell. The ministry was hoping that Pryor might lead them further up the chain, and they could root out the problem once and for all.

Cartwright continued. “I don’t know where he’s getting any of it, which is what you probably want.”

“Then what help are you to me?” Harry asked, getting impatient.

“I know who he sells to, for one,” Cartwright said, holding up a finger. “And I know that he has an exit out the back of the shop that the Aurors haven’t got anyone watching.”

Harry said nothing for a moment, considering. The information was worth something, but he wasn’t quite convinced that Cartwright could be trusted to give them accurate intelligence. “How do you know this, then?”

Cartwright smirked. “A man’s gotta eat.”

“Was that why you were fighting with Pryor?” Harry asked. “Have you been working for him?”

“Even if I have been—and I ain’t saying that I have, mind—even if I had, clearly I ain’t anymore.” Cartwright scratched under his nose. “Hypothetically speaking, though, yeah, that could be the reason. And, hypothetically, Pryor was underpaying me, wasn’t he? Which is the real crime here.”

“All right,” Harry said. He reached into his bag and retrieved a Self-Writing Quill. “He set it to write on the cover of the file folder for lack of other blank parchment. “So. You were working, theoretically, for Pryor.”

“Yeah, theoretically.” Cartwright gestured at the quill. “Make sure it gets that bit.”

Harry glanced at him critically. “Don’t worry, Cartwright. I’ve got bigger problems than you. All right, and you can tell us some of his customers?”

“Yeah, I can. There’s Farley, and Pucey.” Cartwright counted off on his fingers. “Exley, Moors, Pegg, Derrick, Glynn, Hopkirk, Moles. Flint.”

Harry looked up sharply. Several of those names were the people who had been arrested for possession. “Are you sure?”

Cartwright shrugged. “It’s what it said in the ledger, at least. I didn’t make deliveries or nothing.”

Harry cursed mentally. If those names were in Pryor’s ledger, it made it much less likely that anyone was framing them. Draco would not be pleased when Harry told him. “Fine. Do you remember anyone else?”

Cartwright looked thoughtful. “There was one other person that I saw in the shop several times. Thought at the time they was one of yours, but now I’m not sure.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Bloke was definitely an Auror.” Cartwright motioned at his face. “You all have a certain look, you know? He was about six feet, I’d say. Sandy hair. Dunno his name. He’d come in once a week or so, talk to Pryor for maybe half an hour and leave. I never saw him buy anything, which is why I assumed he was working the case.”

“No,” Harry murmured, mostly to himself. “None of us are supposed to talk directly to Pryor.”

“Then I guess he was a customer after all.”

Harry barely heard Cartwright. He knew a tall, sandy-haired Auror. If Owsley had been talking to Pryor, he could be the one who had been planting evidence, including the names in the ledger. And yet, all he had was Cartwright’s word, which was tenuous evidence at best, and quite a bit of speculation. He had to talk to Ron about it, and then—do what? He wasn’t fifteen anymore. He couldn’t go around accusing people on the slightest suspicious, not when just this morning he’d been watching Welling for any sign of guilt. But then, they had been partners on the Malfoy case, and Owsley was mentoring Welling. Harry supposed it wasn’t too much of a stretch to suppose that they might have been working together. Cartwright’s word alone wasn’t enough, though.

Harry wrenched himself back to the present moment. He could contemplate this at length later. Cartwright was still in front of him, and there was more he needed to know.

“Was there anyone else?” Harry asked.

“Not that I can remember.”

Harry sighed and rubbed at his forehead. Fucking Cartwright. “What about this back entrance?”

 

* * *

 

 

On Saturday, Ron and Hermione came to Grimmauld Place so that they could discuss the case away from prying ears and interruptions. Once again, the four of them sat in the kitchen. It was beginning to feel familiar to Harry, to sit with Ron and Hermione across the table, and with Draco leaning back carelessly beside him.

“Cartwright seemed to imply that Owsley had been one of Pryor’s customers,” Harry finished explaining.

Hermione frowned. “He named Owsley?”

“Well, no,” Harry said, reluctantly. “He named a lot of the Death— the people who’ve been arrested for possession,” he corrected himself. Draco glanced over at him sharply, but refrained from commenting on it. “Including Flint.”

Ron rubbed his chin. “Yeah, I meant to bring that up. I looked back into the case, and, honestly, it’s a clean arrest. Flint said someone gave him the pen, but he couldn’t say who. And, Malfoy, I know you said the Flint family doesn’t like to get involved with cursed objects, but he has a record. Seven years ago, he was caught trying to sell some cursed heirlooms to a muggle shop. That’s the reason for the harsher sentencing.”

“So, you don’t think it’s part of a pattern,” Draco said flatly. “Because of something that happened seven years ago.”

Ron grimaced. “It could be related, still. But it seems a bit of a stretch.”

“But,” said Harry, reluctant to give up on the idea that other people had been framed as well, “if someone is going to all these lengths to frame people, especially if it’s someone within the Ministry, then we have to assume that they’ll be good at covering their tracks.” Their only lead vanished if no one else had been framed. He couldn’t afford Ron to begin doubting. Harry looked at Hermione for support. “Don’t you think its odd that Owsley would be seen at Pryor’s?”

“But, Harry, we don’t know if it was Owsley,” Hermione reminded him. “There are plenty of tall, sandy-haired wizards. How did Cartwright even know the person he saw was an Auror? You think whoever it is covers their tracks so well elsewhere and then just walks into Pryor’s shop in his Auror’s robes?”

Harry exhaled, frustrated. “I don’t know. Yeah, maybe he got careless.”

“Harry…” Hermione was giving him one of her looks that said he was getting emotional and unreasonable. It was too much. Suddenly he felt he couldn’t sit still anymore. He stood and began pacing uneasily around the kitchen.

“Maybe the other arrests aren’t connected, after all,” Ron suggested. He glanced at Draco, and Harry followed his gaze. “Sometimes people are just guilty.”

Harry understood the implication and bristled. Draco had clearly heard it as well. His face grew drawn and pale, and his eyes turned hard as flint. “I did not kill Albert Shrew,” he ground out.

Ron leaned across the table. “Listen, mate. I want to believe you. I do. But all we really have is your word for it, and that might be enough for Harry, but it’s not going to be enough for anyone else, and you might want to start getting used to that.”

“Ron!” Hermione scolded.

“If you’re convinced he’s guilty, then what are you doing here?” Harry demanded at the same time.

Ron opened his mouth to respond, but Draco spoke first. “Do you think I don’t know that, Weasley? No, shut up for once in your life, Potter.” He didn’t look at Harry. Harry had an odd, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. The Draco in front of him did not sit and play him Bach and smile as he explained classical music. This was the cold Malfoy of his school days—and yet, somehow less. Just as icy, just as angry, but diminished and tired. Better to call him the Malfoy in the mugshot, and in the Azkaban cell. “I never asked for any of you to look into this. I never asked for Potter to pay my bail. The moment the Aurors showed up at my doorstep, I knew perfectly well that all I would have is my word.” Draco smiled bitterly. “And my word hasn’t meant anything to anyone decent since I was eleven. I will always be suspected of something—I have always been suspected of something. It’s only ever been a matter of time.”

He pushed away from the table and stood. He helps himself rigidly, as if poised to break. Harry wanted to say something, anything, but it all seemed hopelessly inadequate. He reached out his hand. “Draco.”

Draco turned and looked at him. For a moment, the facade slipped, and something like warmth appeared back in his eyes. “I’ll be in my room upstairs. Please let me know if you need anything from me.”

He left the room quietly, letting the door fall to behind him.

Hermione turned to Ron. “That went really well.”

Ron was unrepentant. “It’s a possibility we at least have to acknowledge.”

“Not like that, we didn’t!” Harry snapped. “Are you happy now? Have you got your grudge out of the way, yet?”

“I’m not the one letting my feelings cloud my judgment, here,” Ron snapped back. Hermione beside him looked suddenly guilty. “I do believe that he’s innocent, but I need to hear him say it.”

Harry leaned back against the counter, understanding but still unhappy. “You were acting like an Auror,” he said, his anger deserting him, and a bone-deep weariness settling in its place. He was so impossibly sick of these manipulative mind games. He rubbed his face. “You wanted to catch him off his guard and see how he reacted when stressed because you needed to consider all possibilities.”

“Yes.” Ron glanced between Harry and Hermione. “Look, we’ve not found anything solid in the way of evidence. Our only other remotely possible suspects are the two Aurors arrested him. This isn’t going well. We have to be absolutely sure before we go accusing anyone else.”

Harry glanced at the door. “I should go talk to him.”

“Why don’t I look into Owsley and Welling,” Hermione offered. “They’re watching the two of you still, I’m sure. But I’m not an Auror. I’ll see if I hear any rumors about, oh, I don’t know, corruption or anything for either of them. Even if they didn’t frame Malfoy, maybe I can scrape together enough for the arrest to be called into question.”

Harry felt the beginnings of a headache coming on. “All right. Yeah. Do that. Could you—“ he hesitated, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Could you both leave now, though? I have to go talk to him.”

Hermione gave him a meaningful looked, and he waved her off tiredly. “I’ll let you know the moment I find anything,” she said. “Come on, Ron.”

They threw a pinch of Floo Powder into the fireplace. “I’m sorry, mate,” Ron said. “I know how you feel about him, but you understand why I had to, right?”

Harry nodded. “I’m not angry at you.”

Ron nodded back, stepped into the fire, and disappeared. Hermione now turned to Harry. “Don’t,” he said, before she could speak. “I know you told him. I knew you would tell him. If I didn’t want you to tell him, I should have said.”

“Harry, I’m sorry.”

“Just go.”

Hermione lingered for another moment, looking uncertain, and then she too entered the fireplace and was gone.

The kitchen, though small, felt gaping and empty around Harry. The fire died back down to a cheerful, orange glow. He tipped his head back and let it thunk against the cabinets. “Fuck.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Draco plays [BWV 776 Eb Major](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiXJLRTJnsY)


	6. Dissonante

December wore on with a renewal of tensions between Draco and Harry. Following the incident with Ron, Draco grew more withdrawn. He stopped playing the piano in the evening, usually pleading a headache, or the return of the cough he’d acquired in Azkaban. He felt guilty about it in a strange way, especially given that he had only recently admitted his feelings for Harry to himself. But Gryffindors were Gryffindors, and Draco was under no illusions regarding the fact that if it came down to it, Harry would abandon him in favor of Weasley without a second thought.

He took to spending more and more time out of the house—pushing the limits of when he could return without Harry noticing. The inside of the house grew only more claustrophobic as the weather got colder, and if these were the last few months of freedom that he would have, he was determined to spend them on his own terms. He met Pansy again, at the park usually, but sometimes at a muggle café for lunch. They’d sit inside while the driving winter rains lashed the window and commiserate about their lives.

“I’m going to go absolutely mad if something doesn’t change,” Draco moaned over a chai latte.

Pansy inspected her fresh manicure. “I honestly think muggles might be better at it than wizards,” she said, her tone somewhere between disgusted and impressed.

“I swear, I’m never going to understand your sudden fascination with muggles,” Draco said critically.

“You tuned a piano the muggle way by hand. I don’t think you have any room to talk.”

“That was different,” Draco muttered. “I didn’t have my wand at the time.”

Pansy sniffed delicately at her green tea. “Well, anyway. Are you still whinging about Potter?”

“Yes. Let’s go back to that.”

“Look, Draco.” Pansy sipped at her tea and then set it down. “On the one hand, you said he talked to you after it happened, right?”

“Yeah.” Draco sighed. “He made a whole lot of excuses for Weasley, and then he apologized, and he said that they were still doing everything they could for the case, and that I just had to trust them, but how in Merlin’s name am I supposed to trust them when they don’t even seem to really believe I’m innocent?” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Maybe Mother is right, and I ought to go home and just have faith in the family lawyer.”

Pansy’s expression softened, coming as close to sympathetic as Draco had ever seen her. “Christmas is coming. You ought to try to talk to him again. He’s what most people seem to consider a good person.” She paused. “Although, I have my doubts on that front.”

“Your vote of confidence in him is overwhelming.”

“You may have forgotten what happened in the bathroom sixth year,” Pansy said, her voice suddenly icy, “but I have not. He’s hurt you before, Draco.”

Draco shifted. He remembered the bathroom and that cutting curse very well, but he also remembered attempting to _Crucio_ Harry the moment before. “It’s more complicated than that. I don’t know. I want him to like me. Fuck, Pansy,” Draco pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Fuck, why can’t this just be easy? Why couldn’t I be getting to know him while not simultaneously being framed for murder?”

Pansy reached over and tugged at one of Draco’s hands. He gave it to her reluctantly, and she kissed his palm. “Don’t worry, Draco. If you get convicted we’ll all visit you at least monthly.”

“Thanks.”

“Theo mentioned trying to bribe the judge for you.”

Draco snorted. “That’s sweet of him.”

“Theo has been in love with you since first year, and you know it perfectly well,” Pansy said primly. “The least he could do is a little felony bribery. Speaking of, everyone is anxious to see you. I almost brought Greg along today, but I figured I’d wait until you said it was okay.”

Draco groaned. “I want to see them too, I suppose. I should want to see them. I don’t know, I don’t really want to see anyone.”

“You’re depressed,” Pansy said, sagely. “I’ve been reading some muggle seeko- psych- brain stuff, because I was considering going to a muggle university—did I not tell you that?” She stopped at Draco’s incredulous look. “Yeah, my mum wants me to get married to Angus Bulstrode, of all people—you know, Millie’s older brother? Well, the Bulstrode family came out of it all with quite a bit of money, so Mum wants me to marry him for his fortune. I’m not too keen on the idea myself, so I had the idea of trying for a muggle university, just to expand my horizons, or whatever the phrase is, and also because my mother will absolutely _die_.”

“You’re the pettiest person I know,” Draco informed her.

Pansy shrugged. “Blaise asked if the real Pansy had been kidnapped, and I was Hermione Granger under polyjuice. Anyway, I was reading a bit on—psychology, that’s what its called, and you’re very definitely depressed.”

“So, what’s the cure?” Draco asked, amused. “Since you’re a healer now.”

“I dunno,” Pansy said. “I didn’t read that far. It got boring.”

Draco laughed. That he could believe. Pansy had never been very good with commitment.

“I don’t know, though,” Pansy said thoughtfully. “Maybe staying in that house isn’t good for you. Does he know you’re going out like this?”

“No.” Draco smiled bitterly. “He wants me to stay inside and out of sight.”

“That can’t be good for you. He ought to know that.”

Draco shrugged. “I mean, he keeps offering to bring me back books or whatever I want, but it just feels like I’ve traded the one prison for another.”

“So, leave,” Pansy suggested, shrugging. “Is he really going to stop you?”

“I can’t run out on the bail,” Draco said. He could. It would be very in character with what everyone expected of him. But he’d decided the moment that Harry had brought up his bail in Azkaban that he would not.

Pansy rolled her eyes. “I’m not saying run out on bail. But the Prophet has moved on to bigger and more lurid things. There’s no one camped outside your house anymore. You could go home, and everyone would be far too wrapped up in Kingsley Shacklebolt’s supposed secret lover to give a thestral’s tail hair about what you’re doing.”

Draco shook his head. He still felt— he wasn’t sure what he still felt, but he didn’t want to leave Harry’s house yet. It felt too much like he would be admitting defeat, admitting that he wasn’t good enough for Harry Potter, that he couldn’t get along with him even when Harry was going out of his way to help him.

“On your head be it, then,” Pansy said.

Meeting with Pansy only helped so much, though. As Christmas drew closer, Draco found himself increasingly restless and anxious. The past several Christmases at Malfoy Manor had been depressing, quiet affairs that usually ended with Draco drinking alone in his room. He wasn’t entirely sure what to anticipate from a Christmas at Harry’s house. Kreacher certainly seemed to be excited about it. He had developed a tendency to appear unexpectedly around the house, hanging up ancient and dusty tinsel while humming ancient Christmas carols to himself. Draco was fairly sure that, had Harry actually known what the words to those carols were, he would have stopped Kreacher from humming them immediately. Most of them followed a similar vein of hunting down muggles for sport.

Harry seemed to have been mostly avoiding the topic of what the plans for Christmas were. He changed the subject every time it came up in conversation—not that they were speaking all that often—and so Draco had stopped asking. He would find out sooner or later.

He felt like an unwelcome ghost, haunting Harry’s house.

* * *

 

Things had shifted at the ministry. The end of the year was drawing near, and with it the pressure was growing to close remaining open cases. Harry, who was, if anything, further from finishing the Latvia case than he had been when he came back from Latvia in October, was drowning in paperwork. Cartwright’s information had largely panned out—they now had an Auror watching Pryor’s back exit, and were hoping that they could follow him back to the importer in Edinburgh. Just a few years ago, it would have been Harry himself who was staking Pryor out, watching and waiting, but these days he had people to delegate that to, and he was just left in an increasingly complex web of bureaucracy.

It was exhausting and frustrating and time-consuming. To his private embarrassment, Harry found himself wishing for the days when he had charged off after the bad guys, beholden to no one and responsible for no one.

Meanwhile, although he understood why Ron had pushed Draco like he had, Harry found himself being shorter with Ron than he usually was. He kept turning down invitations to dinner at Ron and Hermione’s, only to return to Grimmauld Place, where Draco had gone back to avoiding him and hiding in his room. Everything was spinning out of control, and Harry didn’t know what to do to fix it anymore.

On a Wednesday in mid-December, Ron came over and leaned against Harry’s desk. “Hi,” he said, awkwardly. “How are you doing?”

Harry shrugged. “Fine. I’m a bit busy.”

Ron looked uncomfortable. “I know you’re still mad at me, but I need to talk to you.”

“I’m not mad at you,” Harry said, wincing internally at the lie.

Ron frowned. “Look, mate, you know why I said that stuff.”

Harry inclined his head toward Welling’s desk. She seemed absorbed in her paperwork at the moment, but he didn’t trust her to not still be listening. And it made a convenient excuse. “I’m busy. I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

“Don’t be like that.”

“Ron, I said I can’t talk.”

“Fine,” Ron said, exasperated. “But we have to talk about this at some point. It’s important. If you don’t want to talk to me, fine, but at least go talk to Hermione at some point.”

“Hermione hates it when we use her as an owl,” Harry pointed out, spitefully.

“Yeah, well, then maybe you should get over yourself,” Ron spat. “Look, just go talk to Hermione later, all right?” He pushed himself upright.

“Wait, Ron,” Harry said, suddenly ashamed with himself. He stopped, not knowing what to say. He could feel his teenage self watching him with disgust. Was he honestly fighting with Ron over Draco Malfoy, of all people? He wanted to apologize, or find some other way to make things right. Ron looked at him expectantly. “I’ll go talk to Hermione after lunch,” he said.

Ron smiled ruefully. “She really does hate it when we use her as an owl.”

Harry snorted. “She should be used to it by now.”

Ron tapped his knuckles against Harry’s desk, and then wandered back over to his desk.

Harry waited a while before he went down to Hermione’s. He tried to force himself to focus on the paperwork for the Latvia case, and when the endless forms began to swim in front of his eyes, he reread the testimony and theories they had gathered about the importer in Scotland. Finally, sometime past midday, he glanced over and noticed that Welling’s desk was empty, so he put the paperwork away and made his way down to Hermione’s office.

She was poring over paperwork of her own when he arrived. He knocked on the door, and she startled. “Oh, Harry! Did Ron send you down?”

Harry nodded.

“Okay, come in, shut the door!” She began clearing a space hastily on her desk, shoving more files into the middle of teetering piles that Harry suspected were held up magically. “Sorry I’m such a mess,” she said, glancing at him. “I’m working on that new werewolf equality bill—did I tell you about that?”

Harry shook his head, feeling vaguely guilty. This was the sort of thing he should have known about.

“It’s been meeting with a lot of resistance,” Hermione said, crossly. “People keep bringing up Fenrir Greyback, but I’ve been making progress. It’s mainly employment rights, right now, but I’m going to see if I can’t sneak schooling rights in there too.”

Harry sighed and dropped into a chair across from Hermione’s. “I feel like I never realized how much needed to change,” he said. “Or, I knew how much needed to change, but I didn’t realize how much needed to change in order to change the things that needed to change.”

Hermione hummed sympathetically. “I know, I feel the same way. It’s a bit inspiring, isn’t it?”

Harry shrugged. “Sometimes it feels more exhausting than anything else. I don’t want to stop, you know, but I also wonder, haven’t I done enough?”

Hermione didn’t answer that, although she did look at him appraisingly. Harry shifted uncomfortably beneath her scrutiny. “So, Ron was trying to tell me something,” he said, to break the silence.

“I hate being in the middle when you two are fighting.” Hermione frowned. “Are you going to make up with him? Say yes, or I won’t tell you.”

“Yeah,” Harry sighed. “Yeah, I will. It’s all so stupid.”

“It is,” Hermione agreed. “Are you going to come to the Weasleys’ again for Christmas this year?”

“Of course,” Harry said, startled. It hadn’t even occurred to him that he might not. “Yes.”

“Good. I think Molly would come to Grimmuald Place and drag you to the burrow if you weren’t there,” Hermione said approvingly. “And Molly and Fleur are even getting along this year, so that’s an improvement.”

“Oh, that’s new.”

“It’s the wedding planning,” Hermione said, pulling a face. “They’ve started collaborating. It’s absolutely awful, but I’ll take it if it means they aren’t at each other’s throats. Anyway,” she waved a hand, “I need to get back to work, so I’ll tell you this quickly, and then you need to leave.” She fixed Harry with a serious look. “Welling and Owsley both have alibis. Welling was out on a different case at the time of the murder, with Mason and Borel, who both vouch for her.”

“And Owsley?” Harry asked. A general sinking feeling took up residence in the center of his chest as his leads slipped further and further away.

Hermione shook her head. “Visiting his mother. Muggle security cameras have him at the nursing home for the whole evening.”

Harry nodded and cursed under his breath. “Well, that does me absolutely no good.”

“I have enough to maybe call the arrest into question,” Hermione said, “but not definitely. It’s not looking good, Harry.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “All right.”

“I’m not giving up on this,” she told him, “I know this is important to you, but I do have to work on this statute too, so I can’t focus entirely on it. I’m sorry, Harry. I’ll be more available after the New Year, but even so.”

“I’ll talk to Draco about it,” Harry said tiredly.

* * *

 

Draco sat on the swing and kicked his heels together. The white pigeon was there again, but she seemed more agitated today. She refused to approach Draco, no matter how many bread crumbs he scattered about himself. He sighed. It figured even the bird didn’t want to see him.

He’d meant to meet Pansy today, but she’d had some all-day charity event that’d she forgotten about. If he hadn’t been an accused murderer at the moment, he probably would have been there as well. As it was, he was almost glad that he didn’t have to see her today. Harry had informed him quietly the night before that whatever leads they had had on the case had dried up. He didn’t think he could face Pansy right now and her jokes about bribery and skipping out on bail. But he also didn’t want to stay in the house, not when the return to Azkaban loomed as such a potent possibility. So, he had wandered into the park, sat down at the swing again, and just let his thoughts unspool idly.

There was also the matter of Christmas. Harry would be going to Weasleys’, and for whatever reason Draco felt betrayed. As much as he had tried to avoid thinking about Christmas plans, he had not expected Harry to just abandon him entirely. Once again, he’d be alone, left behind like a _thing_ in Harry’s house. The whole thing was sostupid. He didn’t know why he had expected anything different. He could hardly hope to be invited to the Weasleys’ for Christmas dinner, and it was even more presumptuous to assume that Harry would have stayed home with him.

The white pigeon cooed at him indignantly from across the park.

“I’ve given you all the food I have,” he told her. “It’s not my fault if you don’t want it.”

She squawked.

“Well, all right, then,” he said. “You ungrateful bird. What if I turned you grey and bland like the rest of your friends?”

She ruffled her wings and regarded him with a single beady eye.

“You’re right,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that to you. But you’re not supposed to call me on my threats.”

He stopped and sighed. He was talking to a pigeon.

The wind picked up and cut through his scarf. He shoved his hands more deeply into his pockets. By all decent standards, it was too cold to be outside like this, but he liked the solitude of it. He liked the way the air stung the back of his throat as he breathed in. Everything would be easier, he was certain, if he didn’t have whatever feelings he had for Harry. In reality, of course, how he felt about Harry barely mattered. The trial, though still months away, looked more and more like a foregone conclusion, like a fast-approaching deadline on the rest of his life. Anything he felt for Harry was too late—eleven years after any chance to act.

He stared at the pigeon, and he wished he could go back. He wished he could be eleven years old again, in Madam Malkin’s, excited about Hogwarts, meeting Harry Potter for the first time and not knowing what all would come of it. He wished he could go back and undo every choice he had made since then, so that instead of sitting on a swing in the cold and hoping that Harry found some way to save him like he saved everyone, he could approach Harry as an equal and as a friend.

He rubbed his eyes tiredly.

It was too cold to be sitting outside like this. He should return to the house. Nonetheless, he sat for a while, staring at nothing and thinking of nothing, until the cold numbed his fingers around the chain of the swing. He shook himself out of his stupor and stood stiffly.

From somewhere behind him, a pigeon cooed softly. The white pigeon in front of him took off in a flurry of pale feathers. A woman cleared her throat.

Draco turned sharply. A woman stood behind him, her large eyes framed by rhinestone spectacles, and her blonde hair done up in elaborate curls. “Draco Malfoy?” she asked, with a pointed smile that revealed several gold teeth.

“No,” Draco said shortly. He turned away and began walking.

“Rita Skeeter,” she said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. We’ve met before, actually, you were so very helpful.”

“I remember,” Draco said. “Whatever you want, I don’t have a comment.”

“Please, Mr Malfoy. My readers are only ever after the truth.” She was hurrying beside him, pulling out a quill and a pad as she spoke. She took a long step and managed to get in front of him, blocking off his path. When he tried to step around her, she moved with him neatly.

“Move, or I’ll hex you,” he threatened. The quill made rapid notes on the pad. Draco cursed.

“Everyone’s been absolutely _dying_ to know where it is that you’ve been,” Skeeter said. “Of course, the main speculation has been that you’ve run off the continent, but the ministry has been denying that one furiously. Or rather, Harry Potter has been. Care to comment?”

“No.”

“Interesting.” She nodded at her pad, which proceeded to jot something else down. “Harry Potter lives around here, doesn’t he? In the old Black house, isn’t it?”

“Let me through.” He tried again to move past her, but she put a hand on his chest and pushed him back with more strength than he expected.

“Potter paid your bail,” she said. He started to repeat that he had nothing to say, but she cut him off. “Don’t worry, that one’s common knowledge by now. Are you staying with Potter, then?”

“Ms Skeeter, I have nothing to say to you,” Draco said. “I insist you let me through.”

“It’s so cute when you play coy,” Skeeter said. “So, you’re not denying that you’re staying with Potter?”

“I’m not saying anything,” Draco repeated, annoyed.

Skeeter’s eyes glittered. “Fascinating. How are you feeling about the upcoming trial? Nervous?”

“Merlin’s beard, you’re relentless.”

“Thank you.”

He grunted and switched direction, walking as quickly as he could. She couldn’t follow him into the house, at least, once he got there, because of the Fidelus charm on it, but he also didn’t like the idea of her hanging around outside of it when Harry got home.

“One quote, Mr Malfoy. One eensie-weensie little quote, and I’ll be off!” she cried, following him closely. “My readers deserve to know!”

“You’re readers don’t deserve anything,” he said. “You can quote that.” He didn’t look to see, but he was sure her infernal quill had written something else down now too.

“What about a comment on why you did it?”

“I didn’t,” Draco said, and then immediately cursed himself for speaking.

“You’re maintaining you’re innocent?” Skeeter asked gleefully.

What the hell, he’d given it to her already. “Yes,” he said, curtly. “You have your quote. Now go.”

“Not quite!” He could hear the grin in her voice. “You’re, of course, a known former Death Eater. How do you expect the trial to go?”

He gritted his teeth. “No comment.”

“Your father is in Azkaban for his part during the war. You were acquitted for your part. Do you think you are being unfairly targeted by the ministry?”

Draco bit his lip. Wouldn’t that be something, if Rita Skeeter wrote an article that accused the ministry of targeting former Death Eaters. But he couldn’t give her that suspicion without knowing what she would do with it. “No comment.”

He heard her huff unhappily. “You’ll have to give me something more than that, Malfoy.”

He rounded on her, suddenly angry with her and her presumptions and her presence here and the way she talked as if he owed her something. “I don’t have to give you anything. Stop following me, stop talking to me, stop writing about me, or I will hex you so badly that your ancestors will feel it, you horrible old hag.”

Skeeter flushed red. “Oh, very nice, Mr Malfoy. How professional of you.” She stuck out a finger, with its claw-like nail, and held it under his nose. “I’ll tell you what I’ll be writing about you now. Draco Malfoy displays no regret for his past actions and has no problem uttering violent threats at those he dislikes. Despite whatever he’s done to make Harry Potter pay his bail, he’s clearly still a guilty, lying Death Eater, and he’ll be seeing his father very soon in Azkaban!”

Draco reached over and grabbed her pad out of the air, tearing off the top pages of it and crumpling it into a ball. “Write whatever the fuck you like,” he snarled.

She snatched her pad back with a screech, then Disapparated. Draco stood in the street, alone, breathing heavily. Beneath his coat, he’d grown warm with anger, and he tugged his scarf off and threw it on the ground impotently. He stared at it, and then he reached down, picked it up, shoved it under his arm, and made his way slowly back to Grimmauld Place.

* * *

 

Christmas Eve came, and Draco wandered the house aimlessly, waiting for and dreading when Harry would leave for the Weasleys’. Grimmauld Place was meant to house a full family, and yet even from different floors, Draco could feel Harry’s presence downstairs, drawing him inexorably toward it. He wanted Harry gone this instant. He wanted to beg Harry to stay. He didn’t know what he wanted.

Throughout the morning, he paced the top floors, wondering if Harry would mind if he went back up to Regulus Black’s room and looked through it again. He wanted to sort through all of Regulus’s things, search for the moment when Regulus had decided to change his mind, as if in doing so he would find some redemption for himself. He wanted to find a diary or a portrait or a ghost, something that he could talk to. Someone who would understand more than Pansy and Greg, neither of whom regretted anything, or Harry and his friends, who had done nothing to regret. But the stairs and Harry’s presence just downstairs felt like some impassable barrier, and Draco didn’t ever make it further than the first of the steps.

He took lunch in his room. Kreacher brought up a cold sandwich and a mug of tea. He ate near the window. It had begun raining halfway through the day, and he watched the occasional muggle outside, hurrying beneath their black umbrellas. He felt the beginnings of old contempt for them, the hatred of their stupid makeshift solutions for what magic made easy, and rather than forcing it down, he reveled in it, as proof that he hadn’t really changed after all.

By mid-afternoon, he could still here Harry moving downstairs, and he went moodily down to the drawing room, determined to force himself to at least be around Harry. On the couch beside Harry was an open case file, but he was staring at one of the portraits with a far away look.

“Are you actually working on Christmas Eve?” Draco asked.

Harry started and looked over at him. “I didn’t hear you come down.”

Draco shrugged and leaned against the doorframe.

“I’m trying to work,” Harry said. He reached over and flipped the file closed. Something in Draco rankled at the gesture. Did Harry not trust him not to look?

He shrugged again and sat down at the piano. He rested his hands on the keys and ran through a few scales to warm up. It felt wrong. He played a few chords, but he hit a wrong note and the discordant mess of it all hung in the air for a moment. He grunted in frustration.

“Don’t play the piano now,” Harry said.

“Well, I’m sorry,” Draco snapped. He banged down a few keys, deliberately at odds with each other. “I thought that was the only thing you kept me around for.”

“What are you talking about?” Harry asked, irritably.

Draco glanced at him and then turned back to the piano. Harry’s bright eyes were fixed on him. “Why am I even here, Potter?”

“We’ve been over this already. Why are you bringing this up now, suddenly?”

“Because it’s Christmas and you’re waltzing off to the Weasleys and their beaver dam, or whatever they call it,” Draco slammed the piano lid shut, as annoyed with his own inability to play as he was with Harry. “And you’re just going to leave me here with an old house elf for company.”

“If you don’t want me to go, then I won’t go.” Harry’s voice was infuriatingly calm and reasonable.

Draco shook his head sharply. “I didn’t say that.”

“Then what do you want from me?"

Draco stood abruptly and turned so he was facing Harry. He ran his hand through his hair. “I want to go home!”

Harry leaned back against the couch and frowned. “And what then, huh? The ministry starts knocking on your door? Or worse, Rita Skeeter?”

“What are you going to do, stop me? Will you come hunt me down at my house and drag me back here in handcuffs?” Draco advanced on him, and then held himself back and began pacing the room.

“You’re acting like I’m some kind of jailer!”

“It sort of feels like that!” He pitched his voice in poor imitation of Harry’s. “‘Draco, stay at home all day! Draco, play the piano all day! Draco, I bought you some books, does that make up for spending the whole day rotting away in this fucking house?’” His voice rose in pitch as he spoke, and the last words came out high and strangled. He felt a tell tale pressure behind his eyes, and he pressed at them with the heels of his hands.

“Would you trust you to go home and not run away if you were in my position?” Harry snapped.

Those words hit Draco like a curse, the betrayal in them stinging more sharply than it should have. He had thought Harry trusted him. He had, in his own cautious way, trusted Harry. He rounded on him. He could feel the blood rushing to his cheeks, and he abandoned all attempts to keep the level of his voice in check. “Oh, so that’s what this is all about? You think I’d run off on bail? And here I thought you cared about me. I should have known better than that.” He hadn’t mean to say the last part.

“That’s not what I meant,” Harry said, more quietly.

“That’s what you said, though, and frankly I think that counts more.”

“How arrogant can you possibly be?” Harry stood suddenly, his own color rising, and jabbed a finger in Draco’s direction.

“You want arrogant?” The rush of the anger was heady and intoxicating, like a dam finally bursting. After weeks of the quiet house and repressed emotion, it felt liberating to let it all out. He had learned a long time ago to hide everything he felt and thought, but he was so tired of living like that. Harry didn’t deserve any of this anger, not after all he had done, and a distant part of Draco watched disapprovingly, warning him that he was sabotaging whatever friendship had grown up between them. But the larger part of Draco couldn’t bring himself to care, or to stem the sudden tide of words and emotions that rushed through him. “All right, let’s talk about arrogant. Let’s talk about you and your fucking saviour complex! Let’s talk about your cavalier attitude toward everything, because you’re Harry fucking Potter, and nothing can touch you. Let’s talk about the part where you _deigned_ to give me a second chance.”

“You don’t get to call me arrogant, Malfoy. Not you of all people,” Harry shouted back. Draco noticed Harry revert to his last name, and his insides twisted in vindication. He’d never been anything else to Harry, then. Just Malfoy, the Slytherin, the enemy, the same as for the past eleven years. “And you don’t get to tell me I have a savior complex. What the fuck do you know about me or anything that I feel? You were on the other side of the war.”

The same distant part of Draco reeled with the shock of Harry saying that so plainly, but the rest of him rallied back. “And doesn’t it all come down to that? Draco Malfoy, former Death Eater, probably a murderer. You think I’m just like my father.” He wanted to hit something, or curse something, or to just scream endlessly. He turned away.

“Don’t put words in my mouth,” Harry snapped.

“I don’t have to,” he snarled back.

“Shut the fuck up, Malfoy.”

“Fine,” he said. “Fine. But you don’t have to say it. Everyone else is. Draco Malfoy will be seeing his father soon. Or did you not see the fucking article?” He regretted that. He should not have mentioned that.

“What article?” Harry asked.

Draco shifted uncomfortably. “The article that Rita Skeeter presumably wrote, after she said exactly that to my face.”

“When did you talk to Rita Skeeter?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” Draco snapped, because it was easier to be angry than to let himself be embarrassed in front of Harry. “A week ago. Turns out your house isn’t that much safer than mine, after all.”

“How did she get in the house?” Harry looked genuinely alarmed.

Draco crossed his arms in front of himself and bit his lip. “Well, she didn’t. I was outside.”

“What were you doing outside?” Harry pushed his hands through his hair, flattening it, before it sprang back, messier than before. “Damn it, Draco! I asked for one thing from you!”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Draco sneered, “I didn’t want to spend all my time dying of boredom in this second prison while I wait to get sent back to Azkaban and you and your friends pretend to care.”

“I paid your bail!” Harry yelled. “I am working day and fucking night on trying to clear your name, and I ask for one thing from you, and you can’t even manage that much! How long have you been going out?”

“You’re such a complete and utter idiot, Potter.” Draco gestured at the piano. “How the fuck did you think I tuned your piano?”

“Jesus Christ, Malfoy.” Harry sat down heavily on the couch again.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It’s a swear.”

“Well in that case, Jesus Christ yourself. I hate this fucking house,” Draco slammed his open hand into the doorframe. “I hate this fucking piano, and I hate being around you!”

“Well, what the fuck else is new? You are the most self-absorbed, ungrateful prick that I have ever had the misfortune to meet.”

“Yeah, well my whole life would be a lot easier if you’d died as a baby, wouldn’t it?” Draco said that just to be cruel, but he saw it hit home more forcefully than he intended. The light in Harry’s eyes became hard and flat.

“Because your family was so favored by Voldemort by the end. Because you enjoyed that so much.”

“Don’t tell me what I did and did not enjoy,” Draco said, although he could almost hear Bellatrix’s high, maniac laugh, and the quiet rasp of scales on hardwood floors. He shuddered, and hoped Harry hadn’t seen.

Harry stood again and took a step toward Draco. Draco drew back. “Is that it then? Have I totally misread you after all? Here I am, trying to give you a second chance, but you’d rather Voldemort had won and you were still that pale and miserable Death Eater? I don’t believe that for a second, Draco.” Harry’s face changed, his expression pained and sympathetic. “I think you’re scared, still. I think you’ve been scared for years and you’ve forgotten how to not be scared.” He reached out and took Draco’s hand.

His touch was warm, and Draco ached for it, ached to lean in and let himself be comforted and understood and told that he deserved this. Instead he pulled away and clutched his hand in to his chest. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me, don’t say these things.”

“We’ll find a way to solve this. I know it doesn’t feel like it right now. I know it’s hard when no one believes you.” Harry looked like he actually believed what he was saying, and that hurt Draco most of all. “But it’s about the choices you make, and if you choose to give up on this then you’ll be paying the price for something you didn’t do.”

“I’ll be paying the price for everything I did!” Draco pressed his hand to his eyes, furious that he could feel angry tears welling up. “I didn’t kill Albert Shrew, but I’ve done other things! I’ve hurt people, and I’ve stood by while people have been hurt. Any choices I had left to make were made a long time ago.”

“That’s not true,” Harry said quietly.

“That is true! I made all my choices, and—“ He stopped for a second, and the forced himself to continue in a pained whisper. “I wish we could go back to the beginning of it all, when we were children, and I could make different choices, but I can’t, and it’s not wrong that I be held accountable for all the things I’ve done, so stop feeling sorry for me, stop trying to give me a second chance, because I don’t deserve a second chance anymore.”

“You were a child.”

“Stop telling me that!” he yelled. “That doesn’t matter! I knew what I was doing, and it is not your place to forgive me for the things that I’ve done.” He didn’t want to be forgiven. What gave Harry the right to forgive him? There were too many ghosts and memories, hanging in the back of his mind, all condemning him. He wanted Harry to leave. He wanted to be left alone with all of his demons, so he could just surrender to them. “Go to the fucking Weasleys’, and let me go home, and whatever happens with this case happens, but you stay out of it.”

“Draco.”

“I don’t want you interfering anymore!” He felt like he was begging, pleading for Harry to leave, or to understand deeper than that and to stay. “I don’t want you to be a part of this! For fuck’s sake, Potter, this could very well be the last real thing that happens to me in my life, and for once in eleven years I want something to happen to me that is not in some way defined by you!”

“I’m just trying to help you!”

“I don’t want your help!” He was going to start crying properly, if he didn’t get angry again. He would cry in front of Harry Potter, and in addition to being guilty and weak and horrible, he’d be humiliated as well. “I never asked for your help. I’m not some charity case.”

“I’m not giving you charity! Why won’t you let anyone help you?”

He thought it because it was cruel, and he said it to watch it cut into Harry, like a curse in a bathroom years ago. “You let people help you and look where that got you. I’m not the one who’s alive because of everyone else’s deaths.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Harry drew back.

“You know perfectly well what I mean,” he said, and he wished he hadn’t said it. He wished that he knew some way to be that wasn’t cruel and terrible. He wished he knew how to stop himself.

“How dare you? How dare you say that?”

“Harry Potter, saviour of the Wizarding World, beacon of forgiveness and mercy.” It had nothing to do with anything, other than that he knew it was hurting Harry. “You had everyone in the world protecting you, and look where that led.”

“I didn’t ask anyone to die for me,” Harry said quietly.

There was a vicious kind of joy to having the tables turned, to seeing Harry hurting and uncertain, and to proving that Draco was just as cruel as he thought himself. “And yet.”

“You don’t get to have a fucking opinion on that, Malfoy.”

“Then don’t tell me that I need to let people help me, Potter. The only time anyone has ever helped me, someone was killed. Dumbledore was killed.” He didn’t regret Dumbledore’s death, not after everything, but he still woke up some mornings, seized by a dread now six years past of holding a shaking wand, knowing what he had to do, and being unable to do it. “I don’t remember you lining up sixth year to ask me what was wrong.”

“I’m offering now, aren’t I?”

“Actually, I remember bleeding out on the bathroom floor.” Draco tugged at his collar to reveal the topmost edge of the long, white scars. Harry sucked in a deep breath, went pale, and looked away. “That was real helpful.”

“What does that have to do with any of this?” Harry whispered.

“Why the fuck are you helping me?” Draco demanded. “Why do you care? Am I just a child who deserves a second chance? Do you think I can’t make my own decisions? For the love of Morgana, let me make my own fucking choices and don’t pay my bail or lock me up, because you are not responsible for me!”

“I know you’re not a child.”

“Then what am I to you? Why do you care about me, Harry? Why now?” Draco could hear his voice turn pleading. He didn’t know what he wanted Harry to say. He wanted Harry to say something. “You’ve never cared before. You never cared when I really needed someone to. Why do you care now?”

“I—“ Harry hesitated, looking uncertain.

Draco turned away, squeezing his eyes shut so he wouldn’t cry. “Just go. You know what? Just.” Harry tried to say something but Draco shook his head. “Just go to the Weasleys’ for Christmas and just let me be. I don’t— I don’t want to see you anymore, Potter. Just go.”

“Draco."

“Please,” Draco said. For a moment, nobody moved, and then there was the faint feeling of the air moving as Harry slipped past him and down to the kitchen. Draco opened his eyes and listened. The sounds from the kitchen were faint, but he could hear the moment when the fire flared up, and then Harry’s voice. And then the house was silent.

Draco stood still, raw and aching and exhausted. His heart was racing in his chest, and as the last of the anger faded, all he had left was pain, like tearing a wound open again. He remembered everything he said and regretted all of it—he wished it wasn’t too late to chase after Harry and apologize for it all. But he also felt oddly light and clean, with everything he’d ever thought about himself all confirmed at once. Harry didn’t care after all, and it didn’t matter how much Draco himself cared, all he was capable of was hurt and anger and cruelty. He wanted to cry until he was hollowed out and empty and gone. He wanted to float away and stop existing.

* * *

 

He packed his things slowly, reluctant to leave, even though he couldn’t bear the thought of being at Grimmauld Place when Harry returned. He forced himself to ritualize every aspect of it, taking his shirts from the wardrobe one by one and folding them neatly before he placed them in the bottom of the case. In a peculiar way, this room in Grimmauld Place had become a bit like home. He didn’t like the idea that once he left, it would return to just another guest room in a house far too big for Harry to live in alone.

In the early evening, Kreacher came to the doorway of his room with supper and watched silently.

“Does Master Draco want Kreacher to pack for him?” he asked, in his rasping voice.

Draco shook his head. “Thank you, Kreacher, I’m fine.”

“Does Master Harry know that Master Draco is leaving?”

Draco glanced at the house elf. Sometimes, he thought Kreacher was devilishly sly. “I don’t think he’ll care. Tell him, if you must.”

Kreacher was silent for a moment in the doorway. “When Master Harry returns home, Kreacher will tell him that Master Draco has left.”

Draco nodded curtly. “Tell him I’ve gone home.”

Kreacher bowed deeply. “Kreacher can be counted on.”

“I know,” Draco said. He smiled weakly. “Thank you, Kreacher. And,” Draco hesitated. “Tell Harry thank you from me.”

Kreacher bowed again. He left quietly, shutting the door behind him.

For all that he drew things out, it did not take very long for him to pack his things away. He sat and ate the meal Kreacher brought him with all the solemnity he would give to a last meal. When he was finished, he shrugged on his winter coat.

The last thing unpacked was his hawthorn wand. He picked it up and held it in his hand, weighing things. He hated being without a wand. He hated the powerlessness and the vulnerability. He had never bothered to learn that much wandless magic. It had never seemed particularly urgent, and he’d privately always thought he lacked the power needed to perform it successfully. But he had learned, after Harry had stolen his wand the first time, to Apparate wandlessly. It took more focus and more effort, but he could do it fairly reliably. There was a gesture to be made here, and the blunt black hawthorn felt too much like old memories.

He set it on the windowsill, picked up his case, and went down the stairs.

He stepped onto the front stoop of the Black house. The rain still fell, the pervasive wet drizzle he’d come to associate with London. He moved further into it, letting himself get wet just because he knew he shouldn’t. He was the only person in the square, and the other houses around were all dark and silent. Nothing indicated Christmastime, or joy, or whatever else it was that was supposed to be the point of the season. It was cold and wet and miserable, the dampness wrapping itself deep around his bones. He wondered if it were different at the Weasley house, if it were warm and full of laughter and people singing Christmas carols. He’d always imagined that Christmastime must be like that for some people, although he’d never known it like that. He thought of Malfoy manor, with its dark, echoing hallways and its overgrown hedges, hollow and empty except for his mother and Franny.

Alone in the square, he let himself crumble. A sob caught in his throat. He felt like he was a teenager again, alone and frightened, and so, so unspeakably tired. For a long and painful moment, he stood and let himself break like he hadn’t permitted himself in years.

But the moment passed, and he straightened, wiped at his face, and thought of home. He thought of his study, and the fire, and then he thought of the secret places on the grounds of the manor that he had hidden himself when he couldn’t bear to be around anyone. He fixed the image in his head, recalled the details of it in winter, with its bare branches of bushes, and the quiet rustle of something small in the undergrowth, turned on his heel, and Apparated.

He kept his eyes tightly closed as he felt himself reappear. The ground beneath his feet was different, and something cold and light fluttered down onto his eyelashes. He opened his eyes and looked around. He was home. In the distance, the manor lights were glowing. The case handle was growing cold in his hand. Just as he had imagined it, something scurried away through the undergrowth.

He walked across the frozen ground, reveling in the familiarity of it all, and the strangeness of at last being home. What had been rain in London here fell in swirling and soft flurries of light snow. His mother was waiting in the house, and she would welcome him home, and he would say nothing to her of whatever had passed between him and Harry, only that they had fought. She would accept it, because he was Draco Malfoy and Harry was Harry Potter. Tomorrow was Christmas Day, and they’d pass it as unremarkably as they had for the past several years. The day after that, he would contact their lawyer, and begin to prepare properly for the trial.

For now, outside and in the snow, the whole world felt quiet and cold and at an uneasy peace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On that note, I'm afraid I'm going to have to take a break from the story for a while. Unfortunately, I'm running into the end of what I had prewritten. I had intended to use the holiday break to write the last two and a half chapters, but some personal issues have come up. The family pet is very ill, and I have several applications that I need to work on and get submitted. All that being said, I DO have more of this story written, and I will NOT be abandoning it (famous last words, I know). Have a very happy holidays, and I'll see you all in the new year.


	7. G.P.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi. So, it's been about five months longer than I said it would be. To make a long story short, my cat died at the end of my winter break and that plus school work left me more or less unable to write this fic for a while. I still haven't been writing it, to be completely honest, but someone (huffelpuffs, i love you, you're my favorite) just left a very, very lovely comment on the first couple chapters of this fic, and I am a creature of ego, so here we are. Chapter 8 IS mostly done, I'm just unhappy with it. So I'll work on that and try and get it up in a timely fashion. I won't make a promise of when it will be up, because I'll just break it. You can get out the pitchforks etc. if it's not up by the end of July at the latest. I hope to have it out before then.
> 
> Since it's been a while, a quick recap (which I will take down when I post the next chapter): Draco has been framed for the murder of a muggle named Albert Shrew. Harry is the only one who believes he is innocent, so Draco has been staying at Grimmauld Place under somewhat contrived circumstances don't @ me about it. He's been playing the piano, he and Harry are super gay but they haven't admitted it to each other, etc. Last chapter, they were both frustrated with the lack of progress, so Draco picked a fight and left.
> 
> Thank you everyone for your patience and your support. I hope you enjoy.

Narcissa Malfoy swept into the room and threw the curtains open. The rings rattled loudly on the rods.

Draco groaned as he rolled over. He pressed his face into the pillow. “What is it?”

“You’ve been moping in here for the past month. I’m sick to death of it. Stop behaving like a child.” Once, he would have never dreamed of arguing with her when she spoke to him in that tone. It conjured up the sensation of his childhood, and being chastised for misbehaving at a long, boring dinner party. Now, he just burrowed deeper into his blankets and squeezed his eyes shut.

“I’ve done stuff.”

“Very little.”

Draco shook his head. “I’ve tuned the piano.”

Narcissa scoffed. “That took you less than a day. You’ve been sleeping until noon and then plonking at the damned thing until you go back to bed.”

He cracked an eye open. “I thought you liked it when I played the piano.”

She fixed him with a withering glare. “I wouldn’t call what you’ve been doing playing. It grates on my nerves.”

Draco hummed irritably. The problem—not that he could tell his mother this—was that he had tuned the piano in a fit of restlessness, trying to recapture the feeling of sitting at the piano at Harry’s house. But every time he sat down to play, an ache of remembrance knifed beneath his ribs. The way that Harry, drunk and sleepy, had been so soft on the couch while Draco played. The way Draco had felt equally at ease, breathing with the music in a way he had never done at home. The dragon ivory keys of the grand piano downstairs had the wrong weight under his fingers—the texture of them and their timbre was off as he played them. The first few notes could tumble from his fingers, but then the yawning horrible reality of it all would open up beneath him, and he’d have to stop, press his palms against his eyes, and begin again, in a horrible and self punishing cycle.

He couldn’t, he’d discovered, cry in front of his mother. He knew he was fraying at the edges and beginning to fall apart, and he knew his mother could see it, and something in him insisted it would all be all right if he could just let it out a little bit and cry properly, but—

But he couldn’t cry in front of his mother.

“Go away,” he murmured.

Narcissa tutted at him. “I’ve made plans for us today.”

“No, thanks.” He didn’t want to see any of his mother’s friends, or even any of his own friends. Any visits would necessarily involve a discussion of his upcoming trial.

“I’m afraid you don’t get a say in this. I’ve made a commitment, and we honour our commitments.” There was a stab of real chastisement in his mother’s tone, which he noted with no small degree of irritation.

“No, thank you, Mother,” he said again. He knew perfectly well how this would look from her point of view: him still buried in the covers like a petulant child. He found he didn’t particularly care.

“We’ve been invited to tea by Mrs Pearce in the village, and you will be coming, Draco, because I am going, and it was you who promised that we’d go to tea at her house in the first place.” Narcissa’s voice had taken on a steely edge, and it was that, as much as the actual words, that made Draco look up and actually register what she was telling him.

It had been an age since he had seen Mrs Pearce, and there was the dim memory, he supposed, of some sort of promise to bring his mother to tea. He couldn’t imagine Narcissa in a muggle parlour, drinking muggle tea.

“When are we going?” he asked. He finally forced himself to sit up, despite the drag of the warm sheets.

“Later this afternoon, I thought we might take the long walk down. It snowed again last night, and the grounds are quite lovely.” She eyed him critically. “The fresh air will do you good.”

“What time is it now?”

“Just after nine. I expect you to be out of bed and behaving within the next half hour, Draco.”

Draco grimaced. He would be left with an uncomfortably long part of the day to fill, and for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what he used to do with himself to pass the time.

“Stop looking so wretched, and find something useful to do with yourself,” Narcissa snapped. “I can make neither heads nor tails of the rents for this month, so you might as well work on that if it’ll stop you from moping around the manor all day.”

Draco nodded. “I’ll be down in a bit then,” he said. He sighed and pushed his fingers through his hair. “You’re probably right. Going out will do me some good.”

Narcissa’s expression grew a little more tender. She cupped Draco’s face with her hand. She rarely let herself express such open affection, and Draco found the whole display a little alarming. “You won’t believe me,” she said softly, “but you deserve none of this, my dear. I wish I could make it all go away.”

Draco grimaced. “It’s not your fault. These things catch up with us all eventually.” She looked as if she might say something more, but Draco shook his head. “I’ll be down soon, Mum.”

Narcissa blinked in surprise, pleased in a way Draco had not seen her look in a long time. She bent forward to kiss his forehead, and then she left the room, glancing back at him as she pulled the door closed.

Draco sat for a long moment in the pale winter sunlight that slanted through the windows, and then swung his bare feet down onto the cold floor.

He’d thought, when he left Grimmauld Place almost a month ago, that when he returned to the manor, he’d be able to find a new equilibrium and settle into a new balancing act as he waited for the trial. Instead, over the past several weeks, shut in the house with just his mother and Franny, without even the escape of the furtive walks to the park and the secret meetings with Pansy, he felt like was hovering in a pregnant stasis that might break at any moment. Where before his arrest he’d been trying to restore the manor, his mother had been uncharacteristically careless with it. In the first few days of his return, he’d poked through the seemingly endless rooms of the manor to find that even the ones he’d put some sort of effort into had begun to fall back into disrepair. In the wake of his fight with Harry, with all the restless energy of the months at Grimmauld Place burned up in the explosive anger and subsequent flight from London, he couldn’t muster up the will to begin the necessary repairs. Instead, trapped in Malfoy manor, claustrophobic in its sprawling ruin, he felt like he was rotting away inside of a rotting house.

He meant to get around to the finances Narcissa had mentioned, but once he’d dressed and eaten, he found himself drawn back to the piano.

His mother caught a glimpse of him on his way, and muttered something that sounded very much like, “Oh, for Merlin’s sake.” Nevertheless, she didn’t try to stop him, so he settled in front of the piano and rested his fingers on the keys.

He sat for fifteen minutes without playing anything, trying to shake the feeling of Harry watching over his shoulder. He didn’t want to play for a memory, today.

Most of the sheet music in the house had been burned during the occupation of the manor, but there was a piece he remembered the melody of—a two-minute simple line of notes, strung together without embellishment or particular comment, more of a sketch than a piano piece. He thought of Harry, asking him to play something from when he was a child, but he forced the memory away. He watched his hands, and then closed his eyes, and let muscle memory guide him through the notes.

His fingers found the melody, one key at a time, slowly and then with more confidence, picking out the treble clef, and filling in the left hand chords somewhat haphazardly with whatever sounded right, rather than any particular memory of the piece. He played it through once, tripping several times over his own fingers, and then worked his way through it again and again until he’d found something—not quite the original, a little melancholy, almost poetic in its lack of pretension.

He looked up at the sound of Narcissa clearing her throat in the doorway.

“I meant to do the finances,” he said. “But I didn’t.”

She shook her head. “This was always my favourite,” she said instead. “I know you learned the Wagner and the Rachmaninoff for me, but this was always my favourite.”

Draco didn’t quite know what to say to that. Something inside of him ached terribly.

She lingered a moment in the doorway, and then swept quietly away. Draco, feeling like he might shatter if he stood up, began the play the piece again. He varied the volume, the tempo, the phrasing, trying embellishments that ruined the piece, before reverting back to a nearly painful simplicity. He wanted to play this for Harry. He wanted to know if Harry would like it or would understand it. If Harry would prefer this simplicity to the dark, complex Beethoven.

He played until hands ached, and then he curled his fingers into fists and sat, trying to pull himself back together at the seams.

Franny edged into the room, with the friendly, familiar amount of noise she used when she wanted to avoid startling someone. Draco was grateful for it. He schooled his face into something resembling calm.

“Mistress Narcissa wants Draco to know it is time to go to tea,” she said, in her high, reedy voice.

He drew a hand across his face. “Thank you, Franny.”

The house elf led the way to the front hall, and he shrugged on his cloak. “We should perhaps dress more as muggles,” he suggested, eyeing his mother’s dress robes.

Narcissa didn’t deign that with a response.

“I thought,” she said, taking his arm, “we might wind down the forest path to the village, and then onwards to Mrs Pearce’s house. You know where it is, I trust?”

Draco hummed noncommittally. “The path by the brook will be faster, and comes out closer to her house. She lives in the orchard cottage.”

Narcissa nodded. “Lead the way, then.”

The air outside was bitingly cold, but his mother was right, as usual. The sting of it against his cheeks felt like waking up after a long time asleep. The snow from the night before coated everything in soft white feather down, and in the bright winter light he felt like he was seeing clearly for the first time since the Aurors had shown up to arrest him.

They walked along the path beside the narrow brook. In the dead of winter it was nothing more than a narrow ribbon of translucent ice. Come spring and the first thaw, it would rush along, loud and bitterly cold. Draco’s heart seized as it occurred to him that he likely wouldn’t be free to see that happen. If his mother noticed the falter in his step and his sharp intake of breath, she said nothing about it.

As it was, Narcissa didn’t try to speak until they were close to Mrs Pearce’s house, and Draco was grateful for it. When she did speak, it was only to ask what the muggle custom was for arriving at a house.

“We ought to knock, is all,” Draco said. “Sometimes there’s a bell.”

Narcissa nodded. They went up the walk to the orchard house, and Draco smiled thinly at his mother as she knocked at the door.

Mrs Pearce opened the door a moment later, bearing a tray of biscuits. “Come in, come in!” she called, bustling back down the hallway. “You’re a bit earlier than I expected, so I’ll come chat in a tic, but I’ve still got to put the kettle on! The sitting room is to the left, dears, so make yourselves comfortable, and I’ll be in.”

Narcissa glanced at Draco sidelong, as if to blame him entirely, and then sat primly on an armchair in the parlour as instructed. Draco sprawled more casually on the sofa.

Mrs Pearce returned a moment later, with both the biscuits and a pot of tea. She laid things out on the table and then sat down herself. “Mrs Malfoy, I’m so glad you could come! I’ve been trying to get Draco here to convince you to come for months.”

Narcissa smiled the slightly false smile that Draco recognized from much of his childhood. “Please, Mrs Pearce, call me Narcissa. Mrs Malfoy was my mother-in-law.”

Mrs Pearce smiled back approvingly. “Narcissa is such a lovely name. Flows off the tongue. And then you’ll call me Amelia, both of you.”

“Splendid,” Draco muttered. “Did you granddaughter come visit you for your birthday?” he asked, dredging up the memory of their last conversation.

“She said she couldn’t,” Mrs Pearce said, “but then she took an overnight bus all the way down here just to surprise me.” She got a bright, mischievous look in her eye. “I was rather hoping the two of you would meet. I think you’d get on.”

Draco glanced at his mother who, traitorously, looked faintly amused. “Perhaps someday,” he hedged.

“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you around,” Mrs Pearce added. “I’d hoped to invite you round for Christmas, but I didn’t know where you’d gone.”

Draco shifted uncomfortably in his seat, trying to think of an appropriate lie.

“What is the pattern on your porcelain, Amelia?” Narcissa interjected smoothly. “It’s absolutely charming.”

“Oh, this was my grandmother’s,” Mrs Pearce set in, and then rattled off about the porcelain for the next several minutes with no small amount of prompting from Narcissa while Draco recollected himself.

The conversation turned to the comfortable pleasantries and inanities that Draco could respond to without expending any real effort. His mother seemed to relax into it, perhaps even beginning to enjoy the comfort of a conversation without the accompanied baggage of the lingering war. He ought to have let himself enjoy it as well, but he couldn’t release the tension in his shoulders.

Narcissa wrinkled her nose. “I hate to ask this, Amelia, but I need to use the toilet.”

“Round the corner, to the right,” Mrs Pearce said cheerfully. “The handle’s a little finnicky, so you might need to flush twice, if you don’t mind.”

“Right,” Narcissa said, standing. “Thank you.”

“Nothing of it.”

Draco and Mrs Pearce sat in silence for a moment. The tense ache inside of him was welling up in the lull in conversation, ballooning in the pit of his stomach. He felt too light and a little woozy, like he might faint or float away. He reached forward to set his cup on the table.

At the same moment Mrs Pearce said his name questioningly. Looking up, he let go of the cup before it was properly on the table. It tipped, looked as if it might balance for a moment, and then tumbled down. He fumbled for it, cursing, but he cup hit the ground with barely a noise. It cracked neatly down the center. The cold remains of his tea seeped across the polished wood.

He stared at it helplessly.

“Oh, shite,” Mrs Pearce said.

“I’m so sorry,” he stuttered. “You said this was your grandmother’s.” He couldn’t look up at her. He reached down and picked up the pieces, cradling them in his hand. If she hadn’t been a muggle, he could have fixed this, but then, he didn’t have his wand anyway because he’d left it at Grimmauld Place, and so all he could do was hold the edges of the porcelain together and imagine they might mend of themselves.

Mrs Pearce put her hand on his knee. “It’s just a cup.”

Draco said nothing, staring at it.

Gently, she pried the pieces from his fingers and set them down on the tray. “Draco, dear, it’s nothing.”

Belatedly, and as if from a great distance, Draco realized he was crying. He wiped at his eyes, but that seemed to only make it worse. He breathed in, but the air got caught somewhere in his throat and turned into a hiccuping sob. Before he knew what was happening, Mrs Pearce had shifted to beside him and pulled him into a rough embrace. He gripped fistfuls of her cardigan and buried his face in her shoulder, trying to stop crying and utterly unable to. Something in his chest had come loose and was forcing itself out of him in tears and sobs. He felt full to the point of bursting and utterly empty.

Mrs Pearce rubbed a soothing hand over his back. “What ever is the matter, dear? Why are you crying?”

“I’ve ruined it all,” he managed to get out. “I didn’t mean to, but I fucked it all as I always do, and there’s not going to be another chance to make it right, and, shit, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t curse.”

Mrs Pearce laughed, a soft huff of air against the top of Draco’s head. “I assure you, I’ve heard it all before.”

“Fuck,” Draco cursed again, just because he could, and because it was the only word he could seem to get out around the force of the sobs that had welled up inside of him. “Fuck, I’m dreadfully in love with him and I’ve ruined it all.”

Mrs Pearce shushed him, and held him, and let him cry.

* * *

 

In the week that followed, Draco and his mother absolutely did not speak of the disastrous visit to Mrs Pearce’s. Draco was eternally grateful for Narcissa’s unfailing discretion that had kept her in the doorway of the room, rather than interrupting. The following Saturday, purely for the sake of appeasing the worried look that kept creeping into his mother’s eye, however, Draco owled Pansy and, after a moment, Greg, inviting them over for drinks that night.

They appeared together that evening, well supplied with their drinks of choice. Greg had brought a bottle of very expensive firewhiskey and Pansy had tucked under her arm a bottle of vodka she had smuggled back into England, after a recent trip to visit a friend from Durmstrang she’d met in fourth year. For his part, Draco had retrieved a fifty-year-old bottle of fairy wine from the cellar, determined to get well and truly plastered.

Pansy raised her eyebrows as he poured himself a brimming glass of the stuff, but didn’t comment.

They’d set up in a little used room in the attics. At the height of the manor, it had been servants’ quarters, Draco reckoned, but for the past several years it had served as their room of choice for drinking and talking when they didn’t want to be interrupted.

“Glad to see you again, mate,” Greg said. “I was beginning to think you’d skipped off the face of the country. Gimme an owl next time, yeah?”

Draco sipped his wine. “Pansy didn’t tell you where I was?”

Greg grimaced and glared at Pansy. For her part, Pansy looked rather self-satisfied. “Nah. You know how she gets when she has a secret she can hold over you. There’s no power in the world that can get her to talk.”

Draco lifted his glass in Pansy’s direction. He appreciated her loyalty, but he didn’t entirely want to have to tell Greg where he’d been at for the past few months. “Pansy, the vault may open, as it were,” he said instead. A pleasant warmth was beginning to settle in the pit of his stomach as he nursed his wine.

“Draco’s been staying with Potter, of all people,” Pansy said, matter-of-factly. “It’s been absolutely awful. Remember how we all thought he’d given up fancying him sixth year?”

“Morgana’s tits, Draco,” Greg swore. “Not this shit again.”

The fairy wine went sour in the face of his friend’s disapproval. “Pansy, love, give me a shot or two of that vodka you’re hoarding.”

Pansy passed the shots over without comment.

“Look, it’s not exactly my fault, is it?” Draco said. It really was quite good vodka, tasteless and smooth. “He shows up, offering to pay my bail with the condition that I stay with him, what the fuck am I supposed to do? Stay in Azkaban?” He paused for a moment, and then added, just because he seemed unable to keep his foot out of his mouth lately, “I didn’t see either of you lining up to pay my bail.”

Pansy nudged his shin with her foot under the table. “It was five hundred thousand galleons. You know neither of us have that kind of money anymore.”

Draco scowled and nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“Where does Potter even live?” Greg asked.

“The old Black house.” Draco grimaced. “Grimmauld Place, remember?”

Greg made a face. “The one with all the creepy house elf heads?”

“In Potter’s defense,” Draco offered, “he did take the heads down.”

Pansy snorted. “Draco’s gone and fallen utterly in love, of course. Greg, I’ve been dying to tell you. All Draco talks about is Potter this, Potter that. It’s absolutely awful.”

“Fat lot of good it’s done me, that,” Draco agreed. “Fuck. I said a lot of shit on Christmas Eve. He did too, but I said more.”

Greg shrugged. “It’s just Potter, though, innit? I mean, he’s always been a self righteous jerk."

Pansy made a sympathetic face. “Greg’s right, Draco. Him and that whole lot always thought they were better than us because they were Gryffindors.”

He looked at her sharply. “Don’t say that.”

Pansy shrugged. “You know I speak only the truth.”

“Yeah, well,” he frowned. “Don’t. I don’t wanna talk about Potter tonight.”

Greg snorted, “Well, that’d be a first.”

Draco gave him a lazy two finger salute.

“Well, I have news, then,” Pansy said, positively preening as the attention turned to her.

“Don’t keep us in suspense,” he prompted.

“I’m seeing someone.” Pansy blushed, which Draco was fairly certain she had never done before in her entire life.

The next half hour or so was spent thoroughly interrogating Pansy about what turned out to be her new girlfriend, a muggleborn witch named Ava who Pansy had met at some Christmas party that she’d gone to. While Pansy talked, Draco gradually let Greg take over the questioning, and he himself grew more absorbed in his wine and the weightless feeling that was stealing over him.

“I think we’ve lost Draco,” Greg commented.

“Hm?” Draco raised his eyebrows at him.

“You’ve not been paying attention,” Pansy accused. “How much wine have you had?”

Draco checked the bottle. It was roughly half full. “Not enough.”

“You can’t drink that stuff like muggle liquor,” Pansy chastised.

“I can still think somewhat straight,” he informed her, “so I’ll be needing a bit more, thanks.”

“You’re still thinking about Potter, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “Can’t be blamed if I am. He’s got, like,” he scowled, “a stupidly perfect face. And he gets all _kind_ when he’s drunk. It’s disgusting.”

“Fucking hell,” Greg said quietly. “Come on, Draco, he’s Harry Potter. He’s an arsehole. You know this, I know this, most of the world would know this if they weren’t too busy falling over themselves for him.”

“Haven’t we already been over this?” Pansy asked. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about Potter tonight.”

“Maybe they were right, though. Maybe they were better than us. Not because they were Gryffindors, but just because…” He trailed off, unable to find the words to finish the sentence. He sketched a vague gesture with his hand. “I mean, Greg and I went off and joined up with the Death Eaters, like the little pieces of shit that we were, and we’ve just gotta fucking live with that now. We have to live with that now, and I’m back in this fucking house that’s absolutely steeped to fuck in it all, and then Harry comes along, and I think, fine, I’m head over heels, but whatever, because he gave me a fucking chance and that’s, that’s something isn’t it?”

Pansy topped off Draco’s glass and he nodded at her in thanks. “Yeah, sure, that could be it,” she said dubiously. “Or, maybe you deserve better than to fall in love with the first guy who looks at you like you’re human.”

“Look, mate,” Greg said, “we all know the whole thing was a bit harder on you than the rest of us.”

Draco interrupted with a harsh laugh, because yeah, a bit harder was one way to put it, if you wanted to downplay the whole fucking thing. The fairy wine was catching up with him properly now. He swallowed another mouthful, just for good measure.

Greg pressed on. “But you can’t let it be the rest of your whole life, you know?”

“Brilliant. Great fucking advice,” Draco snapped. “Dunno if you noticed, but it already is the rest of my life. I’m on trial in a month and a half and then that’s it, I’m off to Azkaban like our fathers. So I’m sorry if I can’t really pay attention to Pansy’s new girlfriend, but I’ve got bigger things to think about.”

Pansy frowned. “Draco, you said when you owled that you didn’t want to talk about these things. If you want to talk about that, we can talk about that.”

“No, I don’t want to talk about that.” He sighed. “It’s just. I can’t stop thinking about it, you know? And anyway, I went and ruined it with Potter didn’t I? He was willing to give me another chance and I cocked it up, like always. So it doesn’t fucking matter anyway because that’s all over, and that’s the rest of my life all laid out for me in vivid fucking Technicolor.”

Pansy put her hand over his, not unkindly, but he drew it back as if he had been stung. He rubbed a hand over his face. “Maybe you guys should go.”

“Don’t be like that,” Greg said.

“I shouldn’t have invited you over, I’m sorry,” Draco interrupted. “I’m not fit for company right now. Please leave. You know the way out.”

Pansy eyed him for a moment and then nodded. “Come on, Greg.” She pointed a finger at Draco. “I’m flooing you tomorrow morning at ten, and if you don’t answer, I’ll come all the way through, and I guarantee you’ll regret it.”

Draco waved a hand.

Greg followed Pansy, but then stopped in the doorway and turned. “One of these days,” he said with a coldness that wasn’t new, but surprised Draco every time, “you’ll remember who your true friends are, and it won’t be any Gryffindors.”

Draco closed his eyes, until he could feel the emptiness of the room. He thought of Harry, dismissing Ron and Hermione after Ron accused him of the lying. He thought of the fight with Harry, and the way Harry had looked so hurt and defeated. He swore under his breath, grabbed the wine bottle by the neck, and made his way wearily to his room.

* * *

 

There came a point, Harry was dimly aware, that verged on insane and obsessive even by his standards. He got to work early, he ate lunch at work, he didn’t leave until all the others had left. Once or twice, he woke up in the dim nighttime light of the office, to realize he’d drifted off and it was now the wee hours of the morning. He’d thrown himself deep into the Latvia case, picking through his old case notes, rereading files he’d gone through a hundred times already, looking for any lead that might be useful, but he was beginning to worry that he’d thrown himself in too far. It was all he thought about anymore, if only because the alternative was his thoughts circling back to Draco and the still-fresh guilt of their fight.

He had started dreaming about Latvia. At night, he opened his eyes to find himself back at the stakeout, beside Oto.

He and Oto had met a few days after Harry arrived in Latvia. Oto, who had not cared in the slightest that Harry had saved wizarding Britain from Voldemort, had taken one look at him and declared that he was not going to trust his life to a skinny kid who’d just graduated from Hogwarts. In response, Harry had disarmed and stunned him. When Oto came to, he’d declared Harry a very fine wizard indeed and invited him out to a drink.

He would never have called Oto a friend, exactly. Beneath the drinks together and the late night takeaway while they watched for movement from suspects had still lurked an odd undercurrent, an understanding that whatever relationship they were building wouldn’t last beyond this case. But he had been as close to a friend as Harry had had in Latvia.

Now, at night, Harry opened his eyes to Oto standing beside him, hissing, _Did you hear that?_ and rushing into the building without waiting for an answer. It was worse in the dreams than it had been in real life. In real life, Harry had entered behind Oto in time to start firing spells off. In real life, it had just been a cutting curse that had slashed Oto open. In Harry’s dreams, though, Harry was always a pace too late. The curse was always a flash of green light, that, instead of leaving him bleeding and gasping on the floor, left Oto pale and lifeless and cold.

Sometimes it wasn’t Oto at all, but Cedric that lay on the floor, or Sirius, or Remus, or Fred, or, on one awful and memorable occasion, the dream changed, and it was Draco lying on the bathroom floor, sixteen years old again, except this time there was no one coming to staunch the bleeding, and Harry had to watch helplessly as Draco shuddered and died.

When Harry woke up from these dreams—usually at home, but sometimes still at the office, with a bit of parchment stuck to his cheek—it always took a moment for his heart rate to slow back to normal, and for him to remember where he was after all. He grew convinced that if he were to just finish the case, wrap up the loose ends, he could stop being haunted by it.

Of course, the irony of it all was that he hated working the case now more than ever. He was moving in endless circles, not getting any closer to sorting out the actual end of it. All he was doing was stirring up memories better left undisturbed.

He ate less, picking at his food so much that Kreacher grew cross and threatened to make Harry cook for himself. He passed sleepless nights haunting through the house, going up to Sirius’ room, but pausing first in Draco’s, where he thought he could still smell Draco, as though in the few months he had been there he had seeped deep into the walls and the floor of the place. The hawthorn wand still sat on the windowsill.

He hadn’t gone into the drawing room since Christmas.

At work, Welling had begun to warm to him again, cautiously coming over in the morning to ask how he was and how the case was going. He couldn’t quite bring himself to be irritated with her anymore. There was a furtiveness to her looks at him, and a carefulness in the way she spoke that was enough to convince him that her new friendliness had more to do with the change in his demeanor and less with the stall on Draco’s case. In turn, he forced himself to be at least civil with her, and once or twice even asked her opinion on some of the Latvia case, when the words began to swim in front of his eyes and he thought he might go quite mad from looking at it.

At the end of January, Harry went to the Weasleys’ again, sick of his empty, echoing house. Molly fussed over him, saying he was too skinny and pale. Ginny watched him shrewdly while they ate, and then cornered him after he finished helping with the dishes.

“You’re a mess,” she informed him, without any preamble.

Harry scowled at her. “I’m fine.”

“You’re really not.” She poked at his ribs. “Merlin’s beard, you look worse than you did when you came off living on the run for a year.”

“It’s not that bad.” Harry tried to extricate himself and duck around her, but she moved to meet him and refused to let him go.

“Don’t try and run away from me,” she said. “And what, what is this?” she gestured at her cheeks.

Harry rubbed at his own cheeks. In the past couple of weeks he hadn’t bothered much with shaving, and a scraggly sort of beard had started to collect itself. “It’s a beard. Lots of people have them.”

Ginny looked utterly unimpressed. “If you’re going to have one, at least take care of it. Fuck, man, I’ve seen bad breakups, yeah? I had to live with Percy after him and Penelope Clearwater broke up for the third time. But this is really something else.”

He frowned. “I’ve not broken up with anyone.”

She snorted. “You keep telling yourself that. Are you going to tell me what happened with Malfoy, or not?”

Harry shrugged. “What’s there to tell? It’s just Malfoy.”

Ginny glanced around them. Harry followed her gaze. George was loitering not too far away, with a studious expression on his face that meant he was trying very hard to look like he wasn’t eavesdropping. Ginny grabbed Harry’s arm and tugged him upstairs, into her old room. She shut the door.

“The eavesdropping wards are still all in place,” she informed Harry. “So don’t start telling me it’s just Malfoy, because I think we all know better than that.”

Harry grimaced and looked out the window. The sun set early this time of year, and the long rays were slanting across the horizon. “I had, I don’t know, feelings, maybe. I felt something for him.” He glanced back at her.

Ginny nodded. “Doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out."

“I didn’t think you knew that I— well, you know.” He frowned. “I never properly came out to you.”

“Harry James Potter,” she said, flopping down onto her bed. The springs of her mattress creaked ominously. “There are very few things that I don’t know about you, and you’d best get used to it.”

He smiled. There was something comforting in that. The familiarity of it felt like an anchor, pinning him down from floating away on a sea of his own stupidity. “Yeah, well.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We fought on Christmas Eve, and he made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want my help, so I’ll leave him alone, I guess. I probably shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place.” He pushed a hand through his hair, and then vainly tried to flatten it out again. “It was never really my problem.”

“That’s never stopped you before,” Ginny said.

That was, he remembered abruptly, exactly what she said to goad him into going to see Draco in the first place, and a distant part of him flared up at that, but the rest of him, most of him, was just entirely too tired to react. He braced himself against the windowsill and leaned his forehead against the cold glass. “What do you want me to do?” he asked, feeling entirely and wastefully spent.

Ginny stood up, and moved so she was standing behind him. She wrapped her arms around him, and he let her turn him around and wrap him in a proper hug. “I just want you to be happy, Harry,” she said into his shoulder.

He tilted his head up so his chin rested on the top of her head. “I think that’s a bit easier said than done, these days.”

She pulled back and looked regarded him squarely. “What is it that you want? What do you really want? You said you had feelings for him?”

Harry bit his lip. He wanted a lot of things, many of which it felt wrong to say to Ginny. He wanted to wrap Draco in the invisibility cloak and keep him safe from the rest of the world. He wanted to watch Draco’s hands as he played piano. He wanted another shot at that night in the kitchen, when Draco had looked at him, open and teasing and fleetingly happy. If he had the chance, he’d reach across the table and take Draco’s hand, and then move closer to him, and kiss him, long and sweetly, and then little by little he’d find all the ways to break him open and learn all his secrets, just so he could treasure them, share their weight, keep them safe.

“I want him,” he said, simply, because that was all there was to it in the end. “But I don’t think he wants me.”

“Have you asked him?”

“Have I asked him.” Harry barked a short laugh. “He told me as much. In very clear terms. He said he didn’t want me in his life anymore, and then he said a whole lot of other things, and it was all very awful, and when I came back he’d gone.” Harry shrugged. “I’m not… I’m not going to chase after him if he doesn’t want me to, Ginny. At some point, it doesn’t really matter what I want.”

Ginny bit her lip and sighed. “You should at least talk to him again. You’ll regret it if you leave things raw like this.”

“I just…” Harry paused and started again. “How is that conversation going to go? I promised him something that I can’t give him, and whether I have feelings now or not seems a little beside the point.”

That was the crux of the issue. Harry’s emotions, turmoiled and confusing as they were, were utterly irrelevant in face of the overwhelming, crushing disappointment of having failed Draco. He’d made a promise to prove him innocent and he’d failed. There was nothing new regarding Shrew’s murder, no last-minute suspects, no sudden witnesses. Just the empty, cold finality of a case that’s been closed, and that most people want to forget about. The outcome of the trial seemed inevitable. In light of that, Draco’s anger at Harry didn’t seem so unjustified at all.

“It’s not your job, you know,” Ginny said. “You don’t have to save everyone. Sometimes people can’t be saved, no matter how hard you try.”

“What else am I here for?” Harry asked helplessly.

Ginny looked away for a moment, and then looked back at Harry. “You know why we broke up?” she asked.

Harry shrugged. “We grew apart.”

She shook her head. “It was because you have this thing where you have to protect everyone, all the time—and I understand it, Harry, I do. I get why you feel like that. But you can’t always protect people, and it’s not always your job. Regardless of whether you can _save_ Draco or not, you need to go talk to him, and let him know how you feel.”

Draco had said something like that, hadn’t he? He’d not phrased it so nicely, but he’d made the same accusation, and it had struck much closer than Harry had expected. It was odd, hearing Ginny echo it, but it gave it a weight he couldn’t ignore. Harry pursed his lips and nodded slowly.

* * *

 

Harry did resolve to speak to Draco, at least initially, but time slipped away from him, and he let February wax without actually acting on it. A few new leads broke through on the Latvia case. On the first Thursday of the month, several Aurors, including Harry, burst into Pryor’s shop in Knockturn Alley and arrested him for pawning the dark artifacts. They’d finally managed to positively identify him: he had a record of arrests and fines stretching back nearly twenty years, all under the name Thomas MacKey. He’d begun going by Edward Pryor after being released from Azkaban in the confusion that marked the early days after the war.

There was a brief fight at the shop during the arrest. Pryor grabbed at some of the cursed artifacts and hurled them toward the Aurors before they were able to stun and subdue him. Owsley was brushed by a cursed amulet, and the side of his face where it touched him turned a deathly gray, but that was the worst of the casualties, and he’d been rushed to St Mungo’s, where he was expected to make a full recovery.

All the seized objects had to be properly catalogued and stored away, which Harry managed to worm his way out of supervising through pure charm and luck. Instead, he got stuck rifling through Pryor’s ledger that they had seized. Half out of lingering guilt, and half out of a vague hunch he couldn’t yet put into words, he began looking through the ledgers for the names that Cartwright had given him in the interview in November.

It was a tedious and thankless business. The ledgers followed chronologically, and without knowing when a given person had come into the shop, there was no way to know where to look for a specific person. Pryor had also taken the precaution of writing it all in code. Harry owed eternal gratitude and thanks to whoever had invented simple decoding spells, but too long spent looking at the translated text gave him a pounding headache that didn’t fade until he lay down in a dark room for an hour or two.

He came to the end of a ledger, late one night, after everyone else had left. Ron had clapped him on the shoulder as he went, and wished him luck. Harry had barely registered it. Absently, already half asleep, Harry reached for the next ledger and then stopped. He had finished. There were no more ledgers to read.

He shook his head, blinking sleep away, and then sat bolt upright as the realization hit him like a shock of adrenaline to his system. He searched frantically through the papers that cluttered his desk for the parchment where he’d been comparing the names in the ledger to the names Cartwright had given him. He found it, under a mug of coffee he couldn’t remember topping off, and he pulled it out carefully.

Farley, Pucey, Exley, Pegg, Derrick, Hopkirk, and Flint had all been named by Cartwright, and had all been arrested for possession, but not a single one of them appeared in the ledger.

Wide awake now, and working off a sudden theory, he slammed open his desk drawer, rifling through for the file for Cartwright’s parents’ murder.

It had been months since he looked at the case, and as much as he had reassured Cartwright about it, it was nowhere near a priority. So, Harry reasoned, it wasn’t his fault that he’d missed this, when it should have been glaringly obvious the entire time.

The Cartwright file, tucked neatly into its manila folder, was squirreled away in the bottom of his desk drawer, and he pulled it out, not caring if he disrupted the rest of the files on top of it. He flipped it open, and scanned down through the details of the murder, such as they were.

Nobody knew much, because nobody had cared much. The Cartwrights were neither well-known, nor well-liked. Their bodies had been found, buried in a shallow grave in a field, with little to indicate who had done the deed, other than that it was likely Death Eaters. The autopsy had indicated signs that the Cruciatus curse had been performed on both of them, but especially on Cartwright’s mother. In the late autumn, the report had finally come through, indicating the more accurate date and time of death.

Harry leaned back, feeling vaguely ill. There had been, hadn’t there, a scar under Cartwright’s eye, the type that might be caused by a desperate man slashing out with a broken glass. He wondered if any of Cartwright’s coats were missing a single silver button. And Cartwright certainly had access to the dark objects necessary for framing the other pureblood families.

Really, it was all contained in the note at the bottom of the file, that Harry hadn’t even bothered to read until now, that said simply: _Several muggleborn murders at this point of the war occurred near or in Malfoy manor. Recommended to focus investigation on Death Eaters present in manor at the time._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Draco plays [To a Wild Rose by Edward MacDowell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V3HV3RBw6s)

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out on [tumblr](http://gedsparrowhawk.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/gedsparrovvhawk)


End file.
